Common Questions / Protecting Your Case
Can I post on social media during my injury case?
You can, and you should not. Defense lawyers and adjusters mine claimants' accounts as a matter of routine, privacy settings do not stop discovery, and a single smiling photo gets weaponized out of context. Deleting after the fact is worse: it can be treated as destroying evidence.
Your accounts are already part of the file
The first thing many insurance defense teams do with a new claim is find the claimant online: every platform, plus the accounts of family and friends who tag them. Nothing about this is exotic; it is a line item in claim investigation. Courts routinely order production of relevant social media content in injury litigation, and privacy settings change who sees a post today, not whether it is discoverable tomorrow. The working assumption for anyone with an active claim should be simple: everything you post, and everything you are tagged in, may be read aloud to a jury with you in the room.
How ordinary posts become defense exhibits
The damage rarely comes from confessions. It comes from context collapse. You attend your niece's birthday and smile for one photograph between doses of pain medication; the exhibit shows a person having a wonderful time. You post an old hiking picture as a memory; the defense presents it undated. You write that you are doing better to stop relatives from worrying; that sentence is now your medical opinion, under your name, contradicting your treating physician. A gym check-in, a vacation tag, a thumbs-up on someone's joke about your crash, each is a thread, and the defense's job is to weave threads into the argument that you are not really hurt.
Why deleting is the bigger mistake
Once litigation is filed or reasonably anticipated, a duty arises to preserve relevant evidence, and your accounts are evidence. Texas courts confronting deleted material can respond with spoliation remedies, including instructions inviting the jury to assume the destroyed content was bad for you, an assumption often uglier than the posts ever were. So the rule has two halves and both matter: stop creating new content about your life, activities, and case, and delete nothing that already exists. If something concerning is already posted, tell your lawyer, who can address it properly; managed honestly, an awkward photo is a footnote, while a deleted one becomes a theme.
The quiet-account habit
Until the case ends: post nothing about the crash, your injuries, your treatment, your activities, or your lawyers. Decline friend requests from people you do not actually know, because investigators send them. Ask family not to tag you. Tighten settings for daily privacy while understanding they are not legal armor. Silver Key Law gives every client this talk in the first meeting, because the cheapest way to handle a defense exhibit is to never create it.
Injured in Arizona? Some rules on this page are Texas-specific. Arizona differs on points that change outcomes, including pure comparative fault and government-claim deadlines. See our Arizona answers or call (888) 508-6967.
Related: Mistakes That Hurt Your Case · Your Deposition · Submit Your Case · All Common Questions
This page is general information about Texas law, not legal advice about your specific situation. Deadlines and outcomes depend on facts; talk to a lawyer about yours.
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