Your Social Media Activity Can Impact Your Custody Case
Twenty years into the era of social media, many of us have become conditioned to sharing our lives and our thoughts on various social media apps and websites like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. This can include kids’ and grandkids’ first day of school photos, graduation and wedding images, photos from our family vacations or romantic getaways, pictures of our foods, funny memes, dad jokes, and gripes about our favorite sports teams or least favorite politicians.
But if you are going through a custody proceeding or working out co-parenting arrangements in the wake of a breakup or divorce, it is crucial that you be as cautious as possible when using social media, especially if you’re the type who is prone to oversharing. Because oversharing in this situation could have a negative impact on your case.
Perhaps your ex is trying to build a case that you are an unfit parent who should be denied custody of your kids. Your social media accounts could be a fertile source of ammunition to use against you in court. Let’s say you went out of town for a weekend of music, dancing and drinking with your friends. If a friend posts pictures to your account of you passed out from drinking, looking goofy in an inebriated state, or getting publicly frisky with someone you met at a club, those images might put you in a negative light. And even if it’s just harmless fun while your children are safely cared for at home, your ex might still try and spin the images to suggest that you’re struggling with drug addiction or alcohol abuse.
Similarly, when a custody proceeding becomes contentious and amplifies in your mind the qualities in your ex that caused you to want to end your marriage in the first place, you must curb the instinct to air your grievances on social media, including in Facebook groups with others venting about their exes as mutual support. If your ex gets hold of these posts, as is likely to happen regardless of how private you think your account may be, it provides even more ammo for them to convince the court that you are being uncooperative in the proceedings. During a custody proceeding, it is important to come across in the most reasonable light.
Meanwhile, if you have a history of oversharing or being over opinionated on social media in the past, it might be a good idea to scrub your account of older posts that could cast you in a negative light in the court’s eyes. That’s because past social media posts can be used in court, too; it’s not just those you’ve made since the proceedings began.
It’s just as important to be discreet on social media once your co-parenting arrangement begins. Negative, hostile posts about the other parent may cause a judge to believe that you are more interested in getting back at your ex than you are in fostering a healthy co-parenting relationship. This could potentially result in a change to the arrangement if the judge feels it’s in the child’s best interest. In fact, some court-drafted parenting plans even have provisions built into them prohibiting parents from making disparaging remarks about each other on social media.
In the end, before making that Facebook post, uploading that TikTok, or posting that story to Insta, you should ask yourself whether you would be comfortable with a judge seeing it, whether you would want your child to see it at some point, and whether it makes you look like a person of good judgment. If the answer to any of those questions is “no,” resist the urge to vent publicly and seek out a friend, family member, therapist or even your attorney instead.