Are Summons Just Get Tweeted Now? Analyzing the Legal Issues With Serving Formal Papers on Social Media

Last Friday, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) served WikiLeaks via Twitter. While the microblog service is extremely popular within the White House these days, it’s one of only a handful of instances when it has been used for such an official purpose, maybe except that time when the U.S. Secretary of State found out he had been fired in a presidential tweet. Legal systems anywhere are usually quite conservative, and are never in haste to take into account some new developments, such as technological advancements. Still, it’s quite hard for courts to keep on ignoring social media platforms, as they can be useful not only in the capacity of passive sources of evidence or means of communication. It looks like now they can become a fairly legitimate way to serve documents when all other methods to do that fail. But nevertheless, how does serving papers via Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn look from a legal perspective? This feature offers our analysis of the situation, as well as relevant domestic and foreign regulations and legal precedents.