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Could Social Media Posts Impact My Workers’ Comp Claim?

Could Social Media Posts Impact My Workers’ Comp Claim

When you’re absent from work for an extended period of time, the employer and insurance company may begin to get suspicious that you’re not as injured as you claim to be. They’ll go to great lengths to determine if you’re being honest about your condition or not, and may hire a private detective that will conduct surveillance on your day-to-day activities to ensure that you are truly injured. 

Additionally, these private investigators will typically look you up online and view any publicly available posts on your social media accounts. This includes Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok and more. If they discover evidence of you doing or saying something that negates your claim or is in relation to your injury, claim or employment, they can and will use it against you in your workers’ compensation case. 

How to Protect Yourself

As far as social media is concerned, the number one way of preventing yourself from jeopardizing your claim is to deactivate or delete your accounts until the claim is finalized. If this feels too extreme for you, you need to at least make the account totally private and refrain from posting about anything related to your current activities, the injury itself, your employer, and the claim. 

Beware that it can be difficult to see what, exactly, is private on your social media accounts, and things can become private without you even realizing it. Additionally, coworkers that you’re friends with may share posts with your employer or they could be seen while the coworker is at work. You need to assume that anything you post on social media could be public and proceed with caution. 

“Harmless” can be Harmful to Your Claim

You may be completely innocent and doing something irrelevant and casual, but the insurance company is in this for money and they don’t ever want to pay out if they don’t have to. Even the most harmless picture of you in your backyard enjoying yourself can be misconstrued into something much bigger, and it’s not worth it. It’s better to be safe than sorry, so just delete or deactivate and keep your claim out of jeopardy.