Extract from Victoria Hudgins’s article “Think Before You Delete: Social Media’s Mass Deletion Features Could Exasperate E-Discovery”
To mitigate users’ privacy concerns, social media platforms are creating mass deletion features for users to erase their posts, comments and reactions to content. But while those features are a benefit to users looking to erase their digital footprints, they could wreak havoc on investigations and litigation, e-discovery lawyers said.
“You don’t want to have to keep your data perpetually,” noted Cozen O’Connor e-discovery and practice advisory services chair Joseph Tate. “Everyone should have the option to delete their data. In that sense, I think it’s a good thing social media companies allow people to clean up their digital footprint. But before you do that, you want to do an analysis.”
A key component of that analysis includes determining if there’s a reasonable anticipation of litigation and if there’s any legal obligation to preserve that social media data, lawyers said.
