Ella Sherman: E-Discovery Practitioners Are Racing to Adapt to Social Media’s Evolving Landscape

Extract from Ella Sherman’s article “E-discovery Practitioners Are Racing to Adapt to Social Media’s Evolving Landscape”

As new social media platforms appear and existing ones update their features, e-discovery professionals must deal with the consequences of a perpetually shifting environment.

Take TikTok for example: Last Friday, the Supreme Court upheld that TikTok must divest or shut down by Sunday, January 19.

On Saturday night, TikTok shut down prematurely, only for it to start up again hours later on Sunday, not long after President Donald Trump pledged to postpone the app’s ban.

In the days of TikTok limbo, content creators grew more uncertain of their presence on the platform and flocked to RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform with a TikTok-adjacent appearance.

Even before the TikTok supreme court decision, users of X (formerly Twitter) began migrating to Bluesky. And earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg released a new set of content moderation guidelines for Meta platforms.

While the proliferation and evolution of social media platforms is likely to continue, e-discovery professionals have to keep reshaping their processes and staying on top of platforms’ limitations and nuances.

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