Scrolling through Facebook and Twitter feeds is now an acceptable form of detective work because it’s simply so lucrative. Social media-driven arrests are not uncommon because people post really stupid things online that incriminate them, thinking for some reason the police don’t like Facebook or Instagram.

Your digital footprint matters more than ever, and in ways you might not think. It isn’t enough to say, “Well I’m not doing anything wrong, so it’ll be fine”. This is not necessarily true, and status updates from the past may come back to haunt you. You may also be compelled to hand over the details of a friend or follower.

If you are involved in a case where you’re unsure of your rights and responsibilities on social media, contact Vanessa Ash for a free chat about your circumstances to see if we can help you.

     We love to overshare, and it is costing some of us our freedom
Social networks make it really easy to see what people are up to – what they are bragging about, most often – with a few clicks. It also isn’t that hard to get accepted as a ‘friend’ on Facebook or to follow a Twitter feed.

This means your behaviour is available to the police, instantly, like the 19-year-old arrested for posting rap lyrics to his Facebook profile that appeared to say he was intending carry out a bomb attack. His charges were later dismissed, but only after a petition with 50,000 signatures was shown to a judge.

Freedom of speech isn’t necessarily protected online.

     Examples of people being caught by social media

• An Indian man was found trying to sell his grandson, and a woman in the United States was found trying to sell her children, both via Facebook.
• A teenager was bragging on Facebook about a hit-and-run he’d been part of, with another user reporting the activity to the police after seeing the posts. He was arrested.
• A Brit stole over $100,000 worth of jewellery and skipped the country, only to return under a fake name for a holiday – then posting his happy snaps to his Facebook profile, which police were monitoring.
• A group of young thugs were befriended by police officers under cover (they simply accepted the friend requests), and caught after they bragged about their crimes via Facebook.
• An angry passenger tweeted “a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”, and was arrested a week later under the Terrorism Act.
• A couple of young British ladies were off to party in America, but on the way one tweeted that she was going to “go and destroy America”. The pair spent the night in separate cells, and were put on the next plane home, even though they tried to explain that ‘destroy’ is British slang for ‘party’.
• A man was charged with first degree murder after he posted a photograph of himself and his victim to Snapchat, with one of his friends screenshotting the photo with the murderer’s username.
• The teen mother of an 11-month-old boy in Florida was arrested after a photo of her son apparently smoking a bong was posted to Facebook – the mother was cleared of her son actually ingesting drugs, but she was fined for the bong and required to undergo parenting assessments.
• An American man was charged with bank fraud, but fled to Mexico. While he was there, however, he bragged to his friends on Facebook, which happened to include a former justice department official. He was arrested and sent back to the USA, to prison.
• A young man posted how he was drunk driving and hit another car in the process, then drove away. He was eventually charged with a hit-and-run offence after a friend reported the post to the police.

The list goes on and on. It isn’t always just the police looking either – as you can see, many of these examples were called in to police by followers or friends. Additionally, this works out well for our sense of social justice when an idiot gets caught doing something stupid, but it doesn’t bode well for the many other scenarios such as peaceful protests, entrapment, and other forms of targeting by law enforcement.

Social media is being used as evidence everywhere, and can be hard to wriggle out of. If you have social media being used against you in a criminal lawsuit, you may benefit greatly from good legal advice to get you to the other side of charges.

In the meantime, be very, very careful what you lay down in public, even things that you delete – the internet has a long memory, and nothing is ever deleted. It has just been moved to another folder called “Deleted Items” in the guts of the internet.

Get sound legal advice from an experienced lawyer. Contact Vanessa Ash.