A student sued the school district in which he attended high school for failing to protect him against bullying. The school district served discovery requests on the student seeking electronic copies of everything he did on social media during the time period of the alleged bullying. When the student refused to produce all of his social media content, the school district moved to compel.

The court held that the student did not have to produce all of his social media content, but had to produce any materials that revealed, referred, or related to any “emotion, feeling, or mental state.” The court looked to the case of E.E.O.C. v. Simply Storage Management, LLC, 270 F.R.D. 430 (S.D.Ind.2010) to find that the mere fact that the student had social communications was not probative of any mental or emotional state. Rather, the school district would be entitled to discover whatever communications were relevant to the claims or defenses in the matter.

In the social media discovery context, this meant something less than the student’s entire social media history:

To be sure, anything that a person says or does might in some theoretical sense be reflective of her emotional state. But that is hardly a justification for requiring the production of every thought she may have reduced to writing or, indeed, the deposition of everyone she may have talked to.

Despite this attempt by the court at limitation, one is left to wonder whether the scope of the court’s order — requiring production of materials that revealed, referred, or related to any “emotion, feeling, or mental state” — is so vague as to be of no real help. Scarcely anyone’s casual social media content (let alone the content of the typical teenager) contains material that is void of emotion, feeling or mental state. Tweets, comments, status updates and wall postings drip with pride, humor, loneliness, angst, and the rest of the spectrum of human sentiment.

D.O.H. ex rel. Haddad v. Lake Central School Corp., 2014 WL 174675 (N.D.Ind. January 15, 2014)

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Evan Brown is a Chicago attorney helping businesses and individuals identify and manage issues dealing with technology development, copyright, trademarks, software licensing and many other matters involving the internet and new media. Call him at (630) 362-7237 or email ebrown@internetcases.com