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Information From Social Media Information, And What Discovery Limitations Do Courts Place Upon This Information?

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ISSUE I. How can a party use discovery to obtain social media information, and what discovery limitations do courts place upon this information? II. How can a party authenticate social media information in court? BRIEF ANSWER I. The best method to obtain social media information is to use production requests and allow the opposing party to provide the information. II. Parties can authenticate social media information by following the traditional framework for authentication and by using other discovery tools to prove the genuine nature of the information. DICUSSION I. Discovery Information from social media is generally discoverable and attorneys can best obtain it through traditional discovery means such as requests for production. …show more content…

A second issue in this area is how much information a court should allow a party to obtain, which is normally a question of applying traditional relevance rules. There will be specific references to Facebook in this memo, but generally any social media site will follow similar patterns. It should be noted that this is a developing area of law with limited precedent governing it. Few published decisions have set out the scope of discovery concerning social media. Agnieszka A. Mcpeak, The Facebook Digital Footprint: Paving Fair and Consistent Pathways to Civil Discovery of Social Media Data, 48 Wake Forest L. Rev. 887, 914 (2013). To date, there have been no decisions by any Federal appellate court nor have any Kansas appellate courts addressed the issue. Though, we do have decisions from the Federal District Court of Kansas. Consequently, federal district courts are largely the source of guidance on this issue. A. Methods of Obtaining the Information 1. Subpoenaing the Social Media Company While a party may attempt to subpoena a social media company for information, such a method will almost certainly fail due to protections under federal law. The Stored Communications Act (SCA) protects social media companies from releasing the data and information of its patrons because they are

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