The rise of social media discovery requests has become a major trend over the past 10 years. This is not surprising, as the use and accessibility of the various platforms continues to soar. This potential trove of evidence has placed a significant burden on courts to craft rules regulating this modern form of discovery. While courts have made admirable attempts to bring uniformity out of chaos, the growth and evolution of social media may test the long-term applicability of the current framework.
In Pennsylvania, the most common rule governing social media discovery in the civil litigation context is what has come to be known as the “factual predicate” standard. Under this standard, a party may only access private portions of another party’s social media account if they make a threshold showing relevancy based upon the publicly available information of a user’s profile, as in Trail v. Lesko, No. GD-10-017249 (C.P. Alleg. Co. 2012).
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