Palm Beach County Divorce And Family Law Blog

Attorneys and their family law clients in Palm Beach County are either involved in social media or are aware of social media and our society's ever increasing involvement with it.  I have previously blogged about the impact of social media in divorce cases.  However, recently a Facebook communication resulted in its author getting arrested.  A woman in Tennessee recently was arrested for allegedly violating a legal order of protection (that had been previously filed against her) for sending a virtual 'poke' to another woman on Facebook.  The "poke" feature on Facebook may be used to convey a variety of meanings, including simply saying "hi" to friends.  When you poke someone on Facebook, an alert pops up in the corner of that person's Facebook page, alerting them of your poke.  Unfortunately for the Tennessee woman in question, the protective order, filed against her, prohibited her from "telephoning, contacting, or otherwise communicating with the petitioner, directly or indirectly.  Although "poking" is a somewhat passive and new form of correspondence, it is still a form of communication that was prohibited by the protective order. 

Experienced attorneys from Jupiter to Wellington understand that in highly contested divorces a protective order may often occur in which communication direct and indirect, between the parties,  is somehow restricted or may even be prohibited.  The language in the Tennessee protective order is very similar, if not identical, to the language that is found in protective orders issued by the courts in Palm Beach County, Florida.  Consequently, in such circumstances, both family law attorneys must make sure that their clients understand that such a prohibition also includes contacts on various forms of social media.  To learn more about this Tennessee case, please click here. 

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Divorce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.