Did He Really Tweet that? Careful With Social Media Evidence.

I don’t usually blog about politics or sports, but first I wanted to bring up a couple of things I found extremely newsworthy on twitter…

 

 

Pretty sweet, huh? Didn’t even see that in the mainstream media, did you?

 

I guess the end of the Heat’s huge win streak really took a toll on LeBron, eh?

Of course, that is only if either one of these tweets were real – which they aren’t (duh).

There’s a website that has been making the news lately called Lemmetweetthatforyou. It allows anyone to make a fake tweet under anyone else’s real twitter username. Of course, followers of President Obama and LeBron didn’t see my fake tweets, but these things can spread virally as they did recently with Heisman winner Johnny Football.

Now where does that come in for you lawyers? Obviously I know none of you are going to use this to make up fake tweets for parties in your cases “@johnnydefendant “boy, nothing better than drinking, driving, and running red lights!”. But don’t think that it can’t happen to your client. Don’t get duped by, say, your client bringing in fake social media stuff like this that they might have made in the bizarre hope that it would help their case. And if something like this happens to your client, make sure you understand it and can explain it.

Of course – and I don’t recommend this – this allows anyone to argue against any sort of twitter evidence… kinda like when R. Kelly’s lawyers used the “Little Man defense” to argue that technology has gotten to the point where someone can edit a video to put someone else’s head on someone else’s body, so therefore that sex tape wasn’t mine.

(Howard Zimmerle is a lawyer from the Quad Cities. He can be reached at 309-794-1660 or hzimmerle [at] mjwlaw.com. His twitter handle is @HowardZimmerle).