The Evidence Problem I See Most Often
In my work as an expert witness on social media and internet defamation matters, the single biggest obstacle I run into is not a weak legal claim — it's missing evidence. Profiles get deleted. Posts get taken down. Reviews get removed by the platform or quietly edited by the person who wrote them. By the time a case reaches me, the content that started it all is often already gone, and the assumption that "it's probably on archive.org" turns out to be wrong far more often than people expect. The Wayback Machine only has a snapshot of a page if that specific URL happened to be crawled at the right time, and most social media posts, individual reviews, and profile pages were never crawled at all.
That's why the single most important thing anyone can do — before contacting an attorney, before reporting content to a platform, before anything else — is to preserve what's currently visible, right now, while it's still there.
Screenshots and a Timeline
1. Take Full Screenshots
Capture the entire page, including the visible URL and, where possible, the date and time. Screenshot the profile as well as the specific post, and capture any comments or engagement that add context.
2. Start a Written Timeline
A dated journal of what you found, when, where, and who else may have seen it. This becomes just as important as the content itself once a matter is being evaluated.