Social medial touches many aspects of our lives today. It can be a powerful and efficient way to remain connected with our family and friends, find support in the community, and vent our emotions.
Although those aspects of social media have considerable value, your use of these outlets can pose significant risks during your divorce.
In fact, if you’re not careful, then your spouse could use your social media posts to paint you as a bad person, which could impact everything from a pending child custody dispute to property division and spousal support and maintenance.
To protect yourself as much as possible, you need to understand how social media posts are used in the context of a divorce case and what you can do to protect yourself. Let’s jump in.
How social media posts are used in divorce
Your spouse can put your social media posts to many uses. Here are some of them:
- To show poor parenting skills: Raising kids is tough, but the court is going to want to give your kids the best possible chance of success possible. That’s why the judge in your case will look to issue an order that supports your children’s best interests. If your spouse finds social media posts of you consuming alcohol, discussing drug use, talking about an abusive relationship, or even mildly complaining about the struggles of raising children, they’ll use them against you to try to show the judge that you’re unfit to parent your children.
- To show that you don’t need support: If you’re seeking spousal support, then your spouse might dig for social media posts demonstrating that you’re being supported by someone else. For example, if you’ve sparked up a new relationship with a love interest, then your social media posts might show you going on vacations, dining out, or shopping in ways that you can’t afford on your sole income. Your spouse might thus use these posts to argue that your new love interest is providing you with financial support, so your spouse shouldn’t have to.
- To show that you’re hiding assets: Assets that fall into the marital estate should be subjected to the property division process. But if your social media posts show you using assets that arguably were only obtained from the marital estate, then your spouse might use those posts against you to argue that you’ve acted inappropriately. This could jeopardize your ability to acquire other assets through your divorce.
How can you protect yourself from the aggressive use of social media posts?
Your best bet is to avoid social media posting altogether. If it’s too late to avoid social media posting, then you need to mitigate as much as possible. You might be able to effectively do that by:
- Contextualizing the posts so that your spouse doesn’t try to extrapolate something like a glass of wine at dinner into an indication of a drinking problem.
- Minimizing harmful posts by articulating how the behaviors portrayed don’t pose a threat to your child’s well-being.
- Presenting contradictory evidence that reduces the risk of a judge finding that you don’t need support or that you’ve misappropriated marital funds.
- Shifting the focus onto your spouse by finding harmful evidence that speaks to their financial positioning or their ability to care for your children.
Don’t leave your divorce to chance
There’s a lot on the line in your divorce. If you don’t anticipate your spouse’s arguments, then you could be taken by surprise, which could result in a poor outcome for you that negatively impacts you far into the future.
You want to avoid that from happening, which is why now is the time to diligently think through your case and how to craft persuasive arguments that position you for success on all your pending divorce legal issues.