3 ms·
Generally, information that has absolutely no merit in a court case isn't allowed in the courtroom because (I presume) it can subconsciously alter a person's ju
by TheCraiggers 12y ago
Generally, information that has absolutely no merit in a court case isn't allowed in the courtroom because (I presume) it can subconsciously alter a person's judgement of the proceedings.
Assuming a retweet is the full extent of their "friendship", this is the real-world equivalent of dismissing an expert witness because the defendant quoted them in a paper once.
- netcan 12y agoThis is actually kind of interesting. Something like a tweet is context dependent. Some people tweet mostly to their friends and a lot of retweets are in fact indicative of a personal relationship. It will often be easy to estimate for a twitter user, but very hard to make objective enough to work as evidence in court. Do they have just 12 or 12000 followers? Are they tweeting personal tidbits or politics & jokes? etc. These things can add up to an very informed guess.
- rayiner 12y agoIn the U.S. The admissibility of evidence is based on relevance.[1] The modern formulation asks: does consideration of a piece of evidence increase or decrease the probability of some material fact being true? A retweet is certainly relevant. The evidence makes it more likely that two people are friends than the baseline where there is no retweet. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_under_Bayes_theorem http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_under_Bayes_theorem