From Screens to Sentencing: How Social Media Threatens Fairness in the Legal System—Especially for Communities Like Mine

-- By AngelAnene - 20 Feb 2025

Section I : *Examining the Effect of Social Media in the Legal System*

As social media becomes increasingly integrated into every aspect of people’s lives, it consequently influences how we interact with societal structures. The internet, internet culture, and especially social media strongly affect our legal system in numerous unprecedented ways. How trials progress, evidence is gathered, and juries are selected have been shaped greatly by increased social media use. Determining whether these are positive or negative changes requires a critical lens. Ultimately, the entire legal community should be prepared to adapt accordingly to preserve the US legal system’s integrity, or what is left of it.

Subsection A: Trials

My first experience with encounters with the legal system and social media was when I watched the shooting death of TM. I still remember playing with my younger sisters on our living room floor as my parents watched the infamous Trayvon Martin trial. From then on, I grew up with hashtags as memory markers. #MikeBrown, first week of eighth grade, #SandraBland summer break at camp, #BLM elementary school. For me, social media and the law have always been intertwined, and the next iteration of social media and the law exists now in exists in social media and media narratives.

Subsub 1: Court of Public Opinion

In modern times, not only do defendants have to face their trials, but they also face the court of public opinion, where the jurors are less forgiving. We saw this with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, Blake Lively, and Justin Baldoni, and even decades ago with the O.J. Simpson trial. Now, most vibrantly, with Luigi Mangione. In each of these cases, the trial has turned from an attempt at justice to a spectacle.

The entire Depp trial was live-streamed, which is crazy to think about in hindsight. People live-tweeted their opinions as Heard testified. Despite the trial being over three decades ago, most Americans are still with the phrase” if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit," which was broadcast on TV to 150 million Americans. Many folks even threw watch parties. Most recently, we saw Luigi Mangione go from murder suspect to Robin Hood's heartthrob within a matter of days once his social media profile went viral. And currently, we are reckoning with the public smear campaigns that Lively experienced at the hands of Baldoni. All four of these cases reflect public opinion that impacts not only the defense and prosecution strategy but also any potential jurors, tainting the ability to access a fair trial.

Subsection B Jury Selection: Juror Bias and the Social Media Mirror

When it comes to jury selection, while many are afforded a trial with/ a jury of their "peers," those jury members are no longer secluded members of the community but are now a part of our ever more connected technical society. A juror in rural Montana, that never heard of Derek Chauvin, could watch him murder George Floyd in a matter of minutes. Now, more than ever, jurors can access information about major cases and establish their own opinions without even confirming a fact. As such, the voir dire process is less about determining if a juror is fit to serve and more about seeing if the juror has already decided the case for themselves. In an age where gag orders on juries are increasingly impossible and where sequestering a juror can have drastic effects, causing them to lose key resources. The biases and perspectives people can gain from social media directly hinder the ability to have an unbiased and fair jury. Jurors can be even further influenced by the rise of deepfakes, inaccurate AI citations, propaganda, bots, and other malicious technological advances.

Section II *Possible challenges of increased social media influence in the legal system*

Subsection A Privacy, Authenticity, and Digital Harm

Furthermore, people’s digital footprints can be manipulated to fit a certain narrative that attorneys constructed. In the court of public opinion, conceptions are constructed of individuals involved in cases that have tangible and relevant effects on these people. This is bound to affect individuals of color and other marginalized communities disproportionately.

In addition to privacy concerns, social media’s role in the legal system presents issues of authenticity. Social media’s dynamic nature causes difficulty in gathering unaltered, relevant evidence. In this era of Photoshop, AI, deepfakes, etc., people must be hyper-aware and critical of the images presented in front of them. As these tools advance, this will continue to become more and more difficult.

Subsection B Solutions

With all of this in mind, the standard approach to defense or prosecution must change significantly. Justice now is just whose narrative is believed and whose dignity is preserved due to bias amplification. As we are motivated to think about what kind of lawyer we should want to be, ones driven by empathy, understanding, and active listening, this mindset must remain central to our practice.

Solving this issue requires lawyers throughout the legal community to remain up to date on these various complexities. Although this is not something everyone will be willing or able to accomplish independently, I argue that it is essential to reconcile these issues and maintain the justice system. One possible solution is media literacy training for jurors. As they inevitably engage with content about an ongoing trial, they will at least have some tools that would allow them to be critical about the info they receive, not only about social media but also about the prosecution and the defense. A second solution is that in addition to the jury consultants each side hires to see if there is bias against their client, courts should investigate an objective jury consultant whose purpose is to identify possible biases in jurors selected (rather than by attorneys). This would help ensure minimal biases against marginalized groups, etc., based on microaggressions, body language, etc. This is an imperfect system, yes, but a great start.

Your references don't refer anywhere.

It's not clear what the draft is about. There exists various data on the web. That data is sometimes evidence in disputes; they are sometimes information about potential jurors. Data about people may be used in ways that affect their legal rights, including rights we call "privacy rights." We cannot always establish whether data should be received in evidence, and when we can't, we don't. These various propositions are, to one degree or another, obvious. Combining them in the fashion presented in this draft does not produce a clarity greater than the jumble of its parts, nor demonstrate that we need to "reconcile these issues" (reconcile how? what issues?) in order to "maintain the justice system" (against what?).

Improvement depends, I think, on focus. What is the central idea? How have you come by that idea, from what roots, considering what objections or adding what refinements? Where can the reader take your idea further on her own, building from the basis you have established?

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