Mirror has Two Faces: Divorce and Facebook

Personally, I haven’t joined Facebook yet. Lots of my friends and family have sent me invitations, and I feel bad declining them, but I’ve seen what happens there, and I’m not sure I want to be part of it.

The South Carolina Family Law blog reported this week on a growing trend among family lawyers: checking out Facebook profiles to learn information that can be used against a spouse in divorce litigation. Time Magazine even wrote a story about it in a recent issue:

For those who want to connect or reconnect with others, social-networking sites are a huge, glorious honeypot. But for those who are disconnecting, they can make things quite sticky. And as the age of online-social-network users creeps up, it overlaps more with the age of divorce-lawyer users, resulting in the kind of semipublic laundry-airing that can turn aggrieved spouses into enraged ones and friends into embarrassed spectators.

My advice: If you are going to publish a Facebook profile, don’t drunk-post. In fact, don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your parents, kids, boss, co-workers and divorce judge to read…. and don’t let anyone else post those things on your profile page. If your profile is a little boring, keep it that way until you are out of harm’s way (i.e., the divorce and custody litigation are concluded). Or, remove your profile and keep in touch with friends the old-fashioned way: by email.