If you're selected for jury duty (US), should you give up your anonymous social media accounts?
I have old Facebook and Twitter accounts, maybe some others. I'm old so there's a MySpace account out there. But I've mostly been using reddit the last decade or so, and have migrated to Lemmy. Now, Lemmy is the only social media i use. Recent news got me thinking about this question.
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The court has more important things to do than inquire about your internet history, and you'd have to be a moron to bring up the subject.
Why would they ask about social media at all?
Somehow I feel like you haven’t read the news in the last 72 hours…
Man it must be nice to live in wherever bubble @morphballganon is in.
I don't know either. I don't do any TV news. There must more important things going on than jury selection in loser Trump's case. That said, what happened with this social media jury thing?
Well_
It's the first criminal prosecution of a US President, ever.
Like it's never happened before. So from a history, unique event perspective there is that.
But also, yeah it's like totally non news for one person to be in the jury selection process for a trial.
The news is that Court room reporters via Fox were basically doing jurors.
All good points.
Oh, doxing. Yeah. The conservative media machine doesn't sleep on one inch. They have unlimited money, labor, tech, and time. Their goal is to make public service work contentious and adversarial, and stop government from working, especially on things like registrars of voters, boards of education, and of course jury service.
Of course that was going to be an issue in this case. Need to start treating interference with government service as a serious crime.
Because it’s in everyone’s best interest that people with overt bias are dismissed. In high profile cases it’s standard practice for both sides to do pretty intensive research on individual prospective jurors (they get a list), and that often includes scouring the web for their social media accounts. If they find something you posted, and you didn’t disclose your account when asked, you could be in trouble.
I don’t think it’s usually standard to ask specifically about social media accounts, at least in normal mundane cases, but in a crazy case like this, it can say a lot about a person’s ability to be impartial.