Do you have a social media account or webpage content that is critical to your case? If you wait even a day to preserve it, you may lose access to it forever. The online and social media worlds are very unpredictable, and content is constantly getting deleted. Don’t be unprepared and lose critical information that could make or break your case.
SMI’s Export product solves this problem. When an Export order for a webpage or social media account is submitted, our customers can be assured that the information on those pages will be preserved as soon as possible. In addition to compiling the first Export, we have an Export Rerun feature that re-preserves the same webpage in any time interval you choose in real time (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). This can help you track what the subject is adding to or deleting from their profiles to help gauge what the subject wants to keep secret. This is also extremely useful if your subject has been court ordered not to remove content from their social media profiles.
On Facebook specifically, there are two different ways that profiles can disappear. First, a user can simply delete the content or full profile, and it is gone forever. Second, a user can deactivate their account. Deactivating is a way of putting the profile into a sort of hibernation, so it is invisible from public view for a certain time. While their profile is deactivated the user can reactivate it at any time, and users can even specify the date they want their account to be reactivated. Several customers have used our Export re-run feature to monitor a deactivated Facebook account and capture it when it is reactivated.
Deactivated-Facebook-Error-Message
This is the error message Facebook shows when someone has deactivated their account. This is not a message you want to see if you waited too long to order an Export.
Being able to preserve the evidence you need for your case often comes down to timing. In one case, we exported a 1,200 page Facebook account only to find that all of the content on the page was gone the next morning. Inversely, there have been cases where we get a link to Export, and the content is already gone. With that being said, it is important to understand that when something gets deleted on social media, that content is almost impossible to retrieve. If you’re thinking about ordering an Export, get it now!
