A U.S. Magistrate Judge has rejected a request by the defendants in a wrongful-death lawsuit to see the Facebook archives of an accident victim and her family going back seven years. Judge Jeffrey T. Gilbert held that the defendants request for Facebook archives going back to 2006 was too broad and failed to tailor the request to relevant content only. The repositories of social media content like Facebook raises challenges for the court and the Judge held that a party seeking such information should make a threshold relevance showing. The defendants failed to show how all the information they sought in their overly broad request was relevant to the case at hand. The Judge left open the possibility of defendants being able to make a more tailored request for the production of Facebook archives.
See Patricia Manson, Judge nixes bid for Facebook archives, Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, March 8, 2016.
