Social Media can effect your life in many ways. If you’re not careful, social media sites can be a real headache.

What can happen as a result of your social media choices? Lets take a look at a few examples of how social media and ruin your life.

Lose your job or not get hired

Did you know that 93% of recruiters look at social media profiles of prospective hires? You could also lose your job over a social media mistake.

Single Mom Fired Before 1st Day of Work Over Facebook Post

Rockets’ Twitter Guy Fired Over Emoji Violence

Lose a college scholarship or not get recruited

One bad tweet can be costly. Poor social media choices can result in the loss of a scholarship or not getting recruited at all.

Georgia football recruit dropped for misbehaving on Twitter

Lose your legal case

If you are in the midst of a child custody case, divorce, or personal injury claim, social media can actually ruin your case.

Consider this:

- Photos posted on Facebook by your friends can be viewed by people outside your network of “friends” despite your privacy settings.

- ANYONE, including your boss, recruiter, or attorney can see your tweets, even if they’re not following you.

- Courts have ordered injured plaintiffs to produce their social media pages to insurance company lawyers.

- Evidence from social media has been admitted in courts and has been used by police, investigators, and media.

- Law clerks for lawyers check social media for their opponents’ pages, profiles, and pictures.

Steps to take to protect yourself:

- Critically review the photos and posts on your social media sites and remove anything that you wouldn’t want the insurance company or other lawyers to see.

- Check your privacy settings and see if you can block certain people from being able to see that you are even on the site (Facebook allows this).

- Search for your name in the search field and review the information that comes up to make sure it’s acceptable.  Do the same for sites like Google+ and YouTube.

- Never accept friend requests or respond to messages through social media sites from people you do not know.

While the above steps are not foolproof, they will make it less likely that your personal information ends up in the wrong hands. Be careful what you post on social media...or suffer the consequences.

Gary Ashmore
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Helping Dallas & Highland Park, Texas area families with Family Law, Probate & Estate Planning needs.