How Social Media Can Impact a Workers’ Compensation Claim

For better and for worse, social media has become a core part of our lives. While our platforms of choice may vary from person to person, they all play a similar role as an outlet to share experiences and digest news. Social media accounts have also become a key part of workers’ compensation claims, especially when it comes to rejecting or challenging a claim.

Whether you’re in the early stages of filing a claim or if you’re in a legal battle to secure the compensation you deserve, you should expect that your social media activity can and will be used against you. Insurance adjusters and opposing legal representation will almost assuredly comb through all of your accounts and look for any post, like, comment, etc. that can be used to prove that your injury isn’t as severe as you claim and attempt to argue that your case should be thrown out, or that your payment should be lessened.

Workers’ compensation benefits are vital for injured workers and their families, and it’s important to take every step possible to ensure that your claim is upheld. While completely disconnecting from social media is rarely an option, paying close attention to how you use it, especially during the claims process and while receiving claims, is a necessary step to protecting your interests. There have been several cases in recent years where posts online directly led to injury claims being overturned, and there’s no indication that insurance agents or attorneys will slow down on their use of social media when investigating a workers’ compensation claim.

What are Social Media Best Practices to Follow While Filing for Workers’ Compensation?

While there is always a risk when using social media, it’s become such an ingrained part of daily life that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to keep using it while you’re also dealing with a workers’ compensation claim. Whether you use it to keep up with loved ones and acquaintances or if sharing parts of your life is important to you, completely avoiding any social sites isn’t necessarily something that everyone can do. However, there are some things you can do to better protect yourself from turning your social media accounts into a liability:

• Make sure that your privacy settings are set to the highest level of protection. This is a good idea, regardless of whether or not you’re filing a workers’ compensation claim. While setting your accounts to private/friends-only won’t prevent an investigator from gaining access to your posts, it will make it far more difficult for anything to come up with a simple glance.
• Be careful when accepting new friend requests. Once you have your accounts set to private, be careful when letting new people in through that first layer of privacy. Sometimes, these prospective requests are from someone investigating your claim who is looking for any evidence to deny it.
• Avoid talking about your case or claim online. Talking about a pending case or claim online only invites trouble. No post you make will positively impact your situation here, so keeping quiet about it and letting your attorney handle everything is the best way to get to a beneficial outcome.
• Do not delete posts you’ve already made. Even if you slipped up and made a potentially damaging post, deleting it can both make it look like you’re trying to hide something and doesn’t actually prevent an investigator from finding the original post. The social media platform you are using likely has backups of everything regardless of whether or not it was deleted on the user side of things.

While you should avoid talking about your case, that doesn’t mean that you should be completely silent about your injuries. If you regularly post about your life on your accounts, talking about how your injury has affected your daily routine can in fact benefit you. Documenting evidence can go a long way in supporting your claim, and from a more personal angle, can help keep your friends and family up to date with how you’re doing. Recovery can be incredibly hard, and that support from loved ones can go a long way towards making it more manageable. However, it’s still important to be careful when posting about what you’re doing — if your social media activity could potentially be used to argue that your injuries haven’t had as serious of an impact on your life as your workers’ compensation claim suggests, then your posts could end up being used against you.

If you are receiving pushback on your workers’ compensation claims, it may be in your best interest to consult with an experienced attorney. They can advise you in necessary steps to take, and can help you secure the compensation you need to care for yourself and your family as you recover.