Social Media and Surveillance During a Pennsylvania Injury Claim

Yes, they look

Reviewing a claimant's social media is routine, inexpensive, and done early. What gets reviewed is broader than most people assume: your public profiles, photos other people posted and tagged you in, your friends' and relatives' posts, check-ins, event pages, fundraising pages set up on your behalf, fitness and running apps, and marketplace listings.

Privacy settings help, but they are not a wall. Pennsylvania courts have in some circumstances ordered claimants to produce private social media content where the publicly visible portion suggested that the private portion was relevant. Treat 'friends only' as a speed bump, not as protection.

How a harmless post becomes a problem

The issue is almost never that someone was caught faking. It is that context gets stripped away.

One photograph of you standing and smiling at a niece's wedding becomes 'she was dancing at a wedding.' A picture of you next to a lawn mower becomes 'he was doing yard work.' A caption reading 'feeling great today' becomes an admission, regardless of what the previous nine days were like. Nobody presenting that photograph will mention that you sat down twenty minutes later, or paid for it for three days afterward.

Surveillance is legal and more common than you think

Filming someone in a public place is lawful, and defense investigators do it — outside a home, in a parking lot, at a gym, at a child's sporting event, at a grocery store. It tends to cluster around key dates: shortly before a deposition, an independent medical examination, or a mediation.

Surveillance footage is usually short. A few minutes of someone's best hour, presented without the rest of the day around it.

Six rules

Do not delete anything. This is the most important one, and the most counterintuitive. Deleting posts after a claim begins can be treated as destruction of evidence, and the fight over the deletion is almost always worse than whatever was deleted.

Set your accounts to private and stop accepting requests from people you do not know.

Do not post about the accident, your injuries, your treatment, your lawyer, or the case. At all. Including in private groups.

Ask family and friends not to tag you or post photographs of you, and explain why so they take it seriously.

Turn off location sharing and check-ins.

Before you post anything, ask how it would look on a screen in a conference room with no context and someone hostile narrating it.

A word of reassurance

None of this means you have to stop living, hide in your house, or pretend to be worse off than you are. Being active is not the same as being uninjured, and recovery is genuinely uneven — good days and bad days are what injury actually looks like.

The problem is not the truth. The problem is the fight that a single decontextualized image creates, and the time and credibility it costs to answer it. The rules above exist to avoid that fight, not to hide anything.

Talk it through with someone local. If you have questions about your own situation, the attorneys at Joyce, Carmody & Moran can review what happened and explain your options — no cost for the first conversation, and no obligation. We are based in Pittston and handle injury matters throughout Luzerne County.