Social media and the law: If you&re claiming emotional distress, don&t appear happy on Facebook.
Appearing Happy on Facebook May Be Used Against You in a Court of Law& &&
Appearing Happy on Facebook May Be Used Against You in a Court of Law& &&
If people who have experienced trauma aren’t posting sad emoji all the time, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ it might just mean that they’re savvy.
Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photo by iStock/Thinkstock.
In 2006, a Long Island high school teacher pleaded guilty to third-degree rape and endangering the welfare of a child.&Danny Cuesta admitted to preying on a 15-year-old sophomore who attended the school where he taught Spanish. He lured her into a private school office to &make copies,& took her to motels for sex, and posed as her personal &tutor& as an excuse to visit her at home. Cuesta&s victim&known in court filings as &Melissa&&spent fo two other girls came forward to testify that the teacher had assaulted them, too. Cuesta was . Then, Melissa , the school district, and school officials, seeking damages for, among other things, &repeated sexual injury and assault,& &nightmares and sleep deprivation,& &emotional distress,& &alienation of affections,& and &loss of enjoyment of life.&
Soon, lawyers for the school district started poking around Melissa&s Facebook feed. Melissa&s account was mostly locked to outsiders, but some pictures were visible: Melissa hanging out with her boyfriend, Melissa working at a veterinary hospital, Melissa rock climbing, Melissa out drinking with friends. They even found a second Facebook page, a joint account run by Melissa and her boyfriend. Melissa&s blithe Facebook activity didn&t exactly square with her contention, in a deposition, that she suffered from &serious trust issues with everyone& and was &struggling& in her relationship with her boyfriend. Nor did it support her claim of &loss of enjoyment of life,& which as the loss of &watching one&s children grow, participating in recreational activities, and drinking in the many other pleasures that life has to offer.& Rock climbing is a r drinking with friends is one of life&s pleasures, after all. Last month, the court ordered Melissa to hand over every photograph, video, status update, and wall message ever posted on her Facebook accounts so that the school district may search for more clues that Melissa is secretly thriving.
In this time of , we&re trained to fear the nasty note that lies dormant in our feed for days, months, or years before it jumps off the platform and kills our reputations. But Melissa&s case represents an even trickier type of social media snare: the post that makes you look too good for your own good. These days, victims of workplace discrimination or horrific accidents or sexual assaults who seek damages for emotional distress or loss of enjoyment of life can now expect their online profiles to be scraped for evidence that they very much enjoy their lives&or at least, that they appear to on their Facebook pages.
Injury victim tales of woe have been undermined by Facebook updates showing the alleged victim kayaking, riding a motorcycle, or performing a keg stand.
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Consider the case of Kathleen Romano, who was working at her desk at the Stony Brook University Medical Center in 2003 when her office chair collapsed. Romano sued the chair&s manufacturer, Steelcase, alleging that the chair had been defective and that its collapse caused her severe back injury, confined her largely to her home, and led to a loss of enjoyment of life. After clicking around Romano&s social media properties, Steelcase&s attorneys noticed that Romano&s Facebook profile photo showed her smiling&outside her home. And her MySpace postings were peppered with suspicious emoticons: smiley faces. &We figured something smells here,& . &We wanted to see what else was in there.& In 2010, the court granted Steelcase
to 12 years after the chair incident, Romano&s suit remains in litigation. Civil cases built on injury victims& tales of woe have since been undermined by Facebook updates showing the alleged victims kayaking, riding a motorcycle, or performing a keg stand.
Even the most banal of Facebook sentiments can now be used against you in a court of law. A former general manager of a Burbank, California, Home Depot
in 2011, claiming that she&d been wrongly fired and experienced anguish, anxiety, and isolation from friends as a result. So Home Depot dredged up dozens of posts on her Facebook wall from friends wishing her a happy birthday. Would a truly isolated woman get so many birthday wishes on Facebook? The case was .
Facebook is a particularly lush resource for fending off civil suits. But peppy social media postings have been used as ammunition in all kinds of cases. In 2004, a 19-year-old Connecticut woman lost control of her car while driving drunk and killed the friend sit she served a year in prison, then got hauled back to court in 2009 for violating the terms of her parole. Facebook photos of the woman drinking beer at a Yankees game and partying at the Waldorf weren&t key to her second conviction, but the judge . &Where is the remorse?& he asked. &Every one of these pictures looks like you have forgotten about what happened.& (He locked her up for three more years.) In their murder case against Casey Anthony, Florida prosecutors proffered Facebook photos of Anthony following the &disappearance& of her daughter, Caylee, a hint that Anthony&s state of mind at the time conformed to that of a killer, not a caretaker. (That one didn&t stick.) And last week, Paul Nungesser , accusing the school of being &an active supporter& of a campuswide &harassment campaign& against him by allowing Emma Sulkowicz, who has publicly accused him of raping her, to lug her dorm mattress around campus as a way to keep the allegations alive. Nungesser claims that he didn&t assault Sulkowicz, and in his suit produces flirty and friendly Facebook messages that his lawyers say demonstrate how &Emma&s yearning for Paul had become very intense& and how &when Paul did not reciprocate these intense feelings & Emma became viciously angry.& (Sulkowicz that she had strategically played nice in messages following the alleged assault in a bid to get Nungesser alone and confront him about the incident.)
Most social media users aren&t feigning friendliness in such a calculated sense. But social media sites can subtly promote sunny sentiments, which can be a problem for parties who need to prove that they are lonely, sad, and suffering. A
published last year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America tinkered with the Facebook feeds of hundreds of thousands of users and
that &emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.& In other words, a user&s emotional performance on social media may be more influenced by the platform&s dynamics than by her own feelings. And on Facebook, relentless positivity is the dominant affect. In a
published in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law, Kathryn R. Brown distilled recent research on social media psychology and found that users selectively screen photos to present themselves as &attractive& and &having fun,& and that they tune their personae to come across as &socially desirable,& &group-oriented,& and &smiling.& (But you didn&t need a study to tell you that.) Meanwhile, &individuals are unlikely to capture shameful, regrettable, or lonely moments with a camera.& As my Slate colleague Katy Waldman noted in 2012, people
on Facebook. If people who have experienced trauma aren&t posting sad emoji all the time, it doesn&t necessarily mean that they& it might just mean that they&re savvy.
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On Facebook, &the self-presentation, the photos, the things you say, the types of things you post about&they&re all very positive,& says Jeffrey Hancock, a professor in the information science department at Cornell University. &How are you doing? Here&s my baby. Happy birthday! The vast majority of Facebook is certainly more positive than your actual life is.& But Hancock cautions that projecting positivity to friends is nothing new. &If you think about how we present ourselves in &real life,& when we talk to people, we talk about the good times we&re having and the good feelings we&re feeling,& Hancock says. &It is a very old and very deep human phenomenon.&
It&s no stranger in the courtroom, either. &In the old days, [a party] would try to disprove loss of enjoyment of life by photographs and written records,& like &a credit card statement that shows a trip to Disneyland,& says Ann Murphy, a law professor who teaches evidence at Gonzaga University School of Law. Sometimes, attorneys &would hire a private investigator as well, who might see the plaintiff out gardening or having a party.& Facebook just made the PI&s job &a lot easier.&
Still, Facebook posts and tweets can enjoy a particular veneer of credibility in court. They&re contemporaneous observations, straight from the horse&s mouth, permanently recorded for posterity, and easily verifiable. In a
published in the Connecticut Law Review, Allison Pannozzo notes that some legal scholars have argued that &evidence from email and [social media] has a greater chance of unfairly prejudicing and misleading a jury,& because these postings deceive from two directions: The ease of social media encourages exaggerations and falsifications, but the &faux intimacy& fostered by the platforms convinces jurors that they&re believable&that Facebook posts are just like &utterly personal expressions written in private diaries.&
&It&s becoming so standard when you&re involved in a lawsuit for the other party to say, &give us all your social media activity& & from a certain period of time, says Kathryn Brown, the author of the 2012 Vanderbilt paper (and now a labor and employment attorney). And judges oblige, partly because &the average judge is, honestly, someone who&s older and might not be aware of the nuances of social media,& Brown says. But in recent years, a couple of courts have started taking a more nuanced view. In , U.S. Magistrate Judge A. Kathleen Tomlinson of the Eastern District of New York restricted discovery of a plaintiff&s social media activity to posts that made a direct reference to her emotions and potential stressors. &The fact that an individual may express some degree of joy, happiness, or sociability on certain occasions sheds little light on the issue of whether he or she is actually suffering emotional distress,& Tomlinson wrote, citing Brown&s paper. After all, &a severely depressed person may have a good day or several good days and choose to post about those days and avoid posting about moods more reflective of his or her actual emotional state.&
How much our social media activity reflects our offline life is hard to know. In an
where social media was offered as evidence of a plaintiff&s emotional state, Fotini Kourtesis sued a man who rear-ended her car as she drove to work in the winter of 2000. Kourtesis, who was 18 at the time of the crash, claimed the accident left her with chronic pain and a loss of enjoyment of life. She could no longer dance with her family like she used to, she said, or wrestle with her brother as she once did. When the court was shown Facebook pictures of Kourtesis dancing and being lifted into the air by her brother, post-accident, she testified that the triumphant scenes had been carefully posed for the camera. But the judge ruled that it didn&t matter whether the pictures were faked because &even if posed, the photographs were taken in an active social life setting& and constitute evidence that Kourtesis &enjoys life.&
Does fake-dancing for Facebook now constitute a life pleasure on the level of actually dancing? Does a &Happy Birthday& posted to Facebook signify as strong a social connection as a ringing phone or a knock on the door? More and more, the courts say yes. Part of the difficulty posed by these cases is that our basic understanding of what it means to cultivate a relationship or experience the breadth of life&s pleasures is evolving rapidly, even as these early cases continue to inch through the courts. Romano&s chair collapsed the year MyS Kourtesis was rear-ended by that car before Facebook existed. Now, a bedridden accident victim can put on a brave face with the help of an I a worker who&s lost her job can afford to share an em a young woman who can&t dance like she used to still looks lithe in a Facebook upload. Social platforms offer seemingly endless evidence that we&re all enjoying our lives, online. It would be a mistake for courts to assume that that&s all there is.
*Correction, April 30, 2015: This article originally misquoted Kathryn Brown as saying that it&s standard for lawyers to request an opponent&s full social media account history. Many requests concern a specific period of time. ()星际迷航3：超越星辰 大推 !!!
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违法不良信息举报电话： 转 3刘亚仁等主演电影《Happy Facebook》或因与商标撞名而换名
10:49:06&&&来源：&&&
　　中国艺人网消息
由刘亚仁、姜河那等联袂主演韩国电影《Happy Facebook》自开拍以来便引起人们关注。日前却又消息称该片决定考虑变更电影名字，因为与SNS商标名&Facebook&撞名的原因。
　　今天（12月13日），电影相关负责人表示由于该片名称与与SNS商标名重名的情况下，决定再次寻找新的电影名称，现在正在考虑的名称有&Happy Log In&等。他还补充道&因为《Happy Facebook》还未问世，直接用&Facebook&这个名词的话好像不能被允许播出，我们将会进行再一步商议。&
　　该片由电影《6年之痒》导演朴贤真执导。将讲述三对情侣的故事。崔智友将在片中和金柱赫搭档，而姜河那和李絮将饰演一对情侣，而刘亚仁则饰演另外一个故事的男主人公，与李美妍搭档。这也是崔智友继2009年出演《演员们》之后，时隔6年重回银幕。Single By Choice | Boston Magazine
Single By Choice
Photograph by Chad Griffith
If you’ve been single long enough, then you probably have one: a story of such jaw-dropping cluelessness that you shake your head as you retell it. Eva’s happened during Christmas, at her job at a financial office in downtown Boston. The perpetrator: her boss. After he handed out a bottle of wine to every other employee in her department, Eva unwrapped a small bar of soap with a cat sticker on it, and an accompanying mug that said “Everything Tastes Better with Cat Hair in It.”
“I was speechless,” she says now, breaking into a laugh. “The crazy cat lady is really not what you want to be perceived as.” Eva’s sitting in her home in Roslindale, a tidy four-bedroom from the late 1880s that she’s renovated and decorated with retro-chic ’50s-style prints. Her Chihuahua, Alex, slumps lazily in her lap while Shelby, the white Persian cat in question, saunters by her feet. It’s late afternoon, and the golden light refracting through the bay window of her living room gives the house next door a Hopperesque glow. Across the way, you can see her neighbors’ domesticity playing out through their window like the opening sequence of a sitcom: children running across the kitchen with their backpacks, a mother preparing dinner at the stove. But at 51, Eva says she wants no part in any of that. She’s never been married, has never craved children, and has no interest in settling down with anyone in the foreseeable future. The one thing she would like is for everyone else to just accept that she’s happy that way.
Most people don’t need a mug to remind them that they’re single. Amy, 38, says that between the tabloids and television, she can’t escape it. She sometimes wishes she’d gotten hitched—even if it were just for 72 days like Kim Kardashian—if only to get people off her back. “People want you to have reached these major life goals that they’ve reached, and they want you to be like them,” she says. “But I don’t need a man in my life to make me happy.” Steve, who’s 43 and hails from Lexington but now works in L.A., says remaining single has put distance between him and his married friends. When he returns home, he finds them so focused on their kids they can’t have a conversation. All right, he tells himself, I’ll give them a call in 10 years. Tara, who’s 38 and doesn’t want to get married, ended up in an argument with her brother-in-law over Thanksgiving about whether having kids meant your life was automatically busier than a single person’s could ever be. “Your whole life is you!” he shouted. That was the end of the conversation.
In the past decade, increased public support for gay marriage and a growing acceptance of domestic partnerships has helped to redefine what it means to be a couple—and a family—in this country. But what do we make of a person who remains single by choice? Our politically correct culture keeps us from voicing our judgments about people based on skin color, ethnicity, gender, or orientation. Yet we’re quite comfortable telling people that they’ll be better off when they’ve found someone to share their life with. That’s in part because we’re constantly being told that happiness and success come through our partnerships. But what happens to that logic when more of us than ever before are going it alone?
The 2010 U.S. Census found that nearly half of all American adults—100 million—are now single, the highest rate in recent history, and 61 percent of them have never married. Here in Boston, 59 percent of men and 55 percent of women have never walked down the aisle, which has us out-singling New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. And while those stats reflect both our sizable student population and our professional aspirations—our median marrying age, hovering around 30, is among the highest in the nation—it’s also a reflection of national trends. In 1960, 15 percent of American adults had never been married. By 2010, that had nearly doubled to 28 percent. The census also found that for the first time since it started counting, married couples now make up less than half of American households. In all, 31 million Americans live alone. And in Massachusetts, 41 percent of singles rent apartments by themselves, while a quarter put down welcome mats in front of homes they own.
Does this sound bleak? A rising tide of bitter singles who have cast love aside, dejected by their lack of prospects? Actually, recent findings indicate the opposite: A 2006 survey of singles by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 55 percent of the never-married had zero interest in seeking a romantic partner. It turns out that many singles enjoy their independence. They’re leading full lives. And they’re far less lonely and isolated than some may believe. Traditionally, we’ve thought of being single as a stop on the way toward the happy ending. But new research suggests it’s time to rethink what it really means.
What does being single mean? On Facebook, you have seven different coupling scenarios: in a relationship, in an open relationship, in a civil union or domestic partnership, engaged, married, or the delightfully nonspecific “It’s complicated.” The formerly married can choose from among widowed, separated, or divorced. But the simple “single” encapsulates everyone from the 19-year-old college student hooking up on the weekends to the 85-year-old adult who’s determined that marriage and partnership just aren’t for her. How do we define the idea of being happily—and perpetually—single? What do we call that?
For Bella DePaulo, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the term is “single at heart.” She uses it to define herself, and she knows she’s not the only person who feels this way. “It’s a concept that I’m just starting to get out there,” she says. “Single is who I really am, it really suits me. I’m not against coupling. I’m single because it’s the kind of life that’s most meaningful and productive for me.” DePaulo is the author of Singled Out, and has pretty much become the arbiter of the unmarried agenda. She blogs regularly about the social issues facing single people at Psychology Today, taking on topics like stereotypes and stigmatization and highlighting glaring instances of public policy discrimination against the unmarried.
DePaulo says she began to think about the way society treats single people while working on her Ph.D. at Harvard, where, she recalls, her classmates would partner off on weekends, excluding her. Eventually, she coined the phrase “singlism” to characterize the social stigmas that unmarried people face, and edited a book of the same name that was released last May. For years now, she’s been working to shift the knee-jerk reaction society has to singles: that they’re promiscuous and immature, or lonely social introverts. And at long last, her efforts seem to be paying off. More and more of us are revisiting long-held assumptions about what it means to live alone. In fact, researchers are increasingly turning up evidence that marriage isn’t necessarily the better and healthier alternative to being single that it’s often assumed to be.
It’s a brisk November morning at Doyle’s in Jamaica Plain, and the weekly Sunday gathering of knitters have arranged themselves in a cozy, well-lit nook of the pub, needles thrashing silently in their hands. Alice Stern’s head of close-cropped silver hair is bowed, and she squints through her frameless rectangular glasses as she works on a beautiful cashmere cable-knit scarf she’s making for a friend she’ll see at Thanksgiving. The 10 or so women here—some single, some divorced, some married or remarried—busily discuss a knitting party they’re throwing on Black Friday. “Perfect,” Stern says, looking up. “I’ll be able to bring my new spinning wheel.”