Measuring Potential Juror Bias with Social Media Data

After recently viewing my first mock trial, I was incredibly surprised by the Juror deliberations. In this trial a singular juror buffaloed over the deliberation process until the jury split down gender lines and ultimately awarded a nuclear verdict just to quiet the loudmouth juror who spoke up first. The seasoned attorneys around me just laughed at my gob smacked reaction because the see it all the time.

Juries are not really impartial  

Jury trials were designed to present an impartial, unbiased set of peers to decide a matter. Today, in the context of online conspiracy theories and bias against corporations, how does an attorney identify an impartial juror out of a random selection of citizens based on the few demographic data points provided by the court?

Introducing a “juror-ometer“

In the last ten years we have seen the claims adjusting industry transformed by social media data. A snapshot into claimants’ self-reported life and stated goals has been a treasure-trove of information. Social media profiles provide attitude, lifestyle, political leaning and feelings about law and justice all in a single search.

Information from social media profiles can also directly address critical questions for defense attorneys, such as Is this person an independent thinker, or is this person a democrat or republican. It is even possible to measure the amount of ‘reason’ a person demonstrates in living their every day life.

For example, two jurors may look similar (images below are generated by AI)

But one of them is a deeply brainwashed politics-intensive person who has become a superfan of Fox News and has such firm views that they have become isolated from friends and family.  See if you can identify from the photo which one marched in fifteen Black Lives Matters events in 2021? Which was a marine? Which one just lost a friend to suicide?

A social media search will be able to identify all of these wild cards in just a few minutes, and their presence or removal can have significant impact on a juror’s ability to listen to and argument and be persuaded by a reasonable presentation of a case.

Gathering and digesting data in a format that allows quick and even comparisons can be done through scoring and dashboards. Social media is fantastically unstructured information so scoring is the fastest way to compare one juror against another in soft metrics like attitude, racial biases, independent thought and political affiliation. A sample dashboard of available social media data is shown below, courtesy of Jury Selectr (fraudsniffr.com/jury-selectr). This would be considered a positive addition to a jury.

Jury trial has always been an art Vs. a science, but maybe a little science can make the art that much more powerful. Social media has the potential to give that window into the mindset of a juror with potentially dramatic results.