Statements construable as malevolent intent beforehand can sink you in court, criminal and civil court alike. This includes statements made on social media platforms. Let’s look at some examples.

Case One: Neo-Nazi Sentiments on Social Media

In June 2023, an ABC News report reads in part, “A Michigan teenager who authorities say expressed explicit neo-Nazi and antisemitic ideologies online was arrested Friday by the FBI who alleged he stockpiled weapons and was planning a mass shooting.

“Investigators allege the teen had communicated with another user on Instagram where they expressed strong views against the Jewish population, support for neo-Nazis and idolization of previous mass shooters, according to the criminal complaint.”

In this case, the young suspect made Instagram statements to the effect that he could access machine guns and explosives.

The news report added, “A search of the suspect’s phone found a message in the Notes app where he had identified a synagogue in East Lansing, a date, and a list of equipment, according to the complaint.”

And it isn’t just Instagram.

Case Two: Premeditated Police Brutality?

Let’s go back to the early 1990s in California and the confrontation between LAPD officers and one Rodney King. Fifty-some baton swings were counted on a video taken by a bystander, George Holliday.

When all four officers criminally charged in the incident were acquitted by a jury, the “Rodney King Riot” caused more than a billion dollars in damages. Likewise, there were some 60 deaths by the time the last injured victim succumbed, as well as thousands of injuries.

We’ve all heard people in high-crime cities say something like, “It’s a jungle out there.”

One of the most popular movies of the 1950s was “Blackboard Jungle,” about juvenile delinquency. Shortly before the King incident, a message emanated from the patrol car of two of the involved officers.

They had just been to a domestic disturbance involving African Americans, and the message said, “Sounds almost as exciting as our last call. It was right out of ‘Gorillas in the Mist.’”

Not surprisingly, the prosecution presented this as evidence of racial animus. It was an implication that the officer who sent the message considered African-Americans, such as the soon-to-be-faced Rodney King, to be sub-human and apelike. One of those two officers was, in fact, convicted in the second trial. Such is the power of words.

Trouble doesn’t just come from official communications. Private social media gets cops in trouble, too, often costing them their jobs or even their careers. In June of 2023, a Google search for “police officer discipline involving social media” turned up more than 38 million hits in less than half a second.

Case Three: Social Media Statement vs. Real-Life Self-Defense

Terribly destructive courtroom aftershocks from social media don’t just happen to police. They can be brutal on law-abiding armed citizens, too.

In Austin, Texas, Army sergeant Daniel Perry was moonlighting as an Uber driver. He unexpectedly found himself amid a large-scale protest in the street. A member of the crowd who was wearing a semi-automatic AK-47 clone on a tactical sling approached the driver’s door.

The man had his loaded weapon in a ready position from which he could have instantly killed the driver. The Uber driver whipped out his J-frame Smith & Wesson and emptied it into the rifleman. He hit the man with all five shots, fatally wounding him.

The driver was convicted, and his case is now under appeal. Virtually every legal analyst cast part or even most of the blame for his conviction on his previous posts on social media. In the posts, he had expressed a strong willingness to shoot rioters in such a situation.

If we have to shoot someone in self-defense, can we invoke his inflammatory social media posts to support our position that he was inclined to unlawfully attack people like us? Probably not.

In this case, the deceased had said some pretty inflammatory things himself. This included some extreme hatred of the police. But it was not allowed. The reason was that, as is explained in Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), if you didn’t know of those sentiments being posted before the shooting, they didn’t inform the decision and action for which you are being judged.

Personally, I hope that the shooter in this case gets another trial and another chance to prove justification.

Case Four: Loose Lips Sink Ships

People were hanging themselves with their words long before social media existed. Let’s look at a man who was literally hung by his tongue—Old West gunman Tom Horn. Early on, he had been an honorable man who worked variously as a military scout, lawman, detective, and member of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

Unfortunately, he then went to work for a cattleman’s association as basically a hitman. In this role, he earned a bounty for killing suspected cow thieves. He was suspected of murdering one target’s 14-year-old son by mistake, shooting from a relatively long range with a rifle.

Investigator Joe LeFors arranged to have drinks with Horn. Present were a hidden witness and a hidden stenographer who recorded the conversation. A drunk Tom Horn confessed to the killing, famously saying, “It was the best shot I ever made and the dirtiest trick I ever done.”

Those words got him convicted of murder. Some of Tom Horn’s defenders claimed, then and now, that his statement was just drunken braggadocio. No matter. They were Tom Horn’s words and constituted a confession of culpability.

In 1903, Tom Horn died at the end of a rope on the gallows in Wyoming.

One of the most famous photographs to emerge from that era is a picture of Tom Horn in jail, braiding the very rope that would soon become the noose around his neck.

I respectfully suggest that Tom Horn hung himself with his own tongue long before that hemp went around his neck.