You may love social media. It makes it easy to interact with people you wouldn’t otherwise see, you can quickly share pictures and updates and it simply offers a lot of fun—and a way to kill time. If you’re getting divorced in Florida, though, it may not seem so fun if it has a negative impact on your proceedings.
For example, if you’re trying to get custody of your children, your spouse may bring in pictures of you that he or she found on Facebook such as pictures where you are drinking and partying with your friends. It doesn’t matter if it was legal or if you rarely go out; your spouse could try to paint a picture to the court that you just aren’t responsible enough to watch children, indicating that this what you like to do most of the time.
Social media is also often used to hotly debate purchases and income levels. For example, you may be trying to keep the child support payments down, but your spouse could bring up pictures of you with a new car or on vacation and claim you clearly have enough money to pay more.
Now, it’s important to note that your social media accounts can count as evidence, so it’s often illegal to delete anything incriminating once you’ve decided to get divorced. Plus, many things that are deleted on the Internet are not really “gone” anyway.
As such, it’s often better to abstain from social media entirely until the divorce is over. This way, you don’t get in legal trouble for deleting things, but you also don’t post things that hurt you.
Make sure you carefully consider the legal impact of all actions you take and that you understand the divorce laws completely.
Source: Fox Business, “Can Social Media Hurt You in a Divorce?,” Andrea Murad, accessed Nov. 27, 2015
