HOUSTON — A Texas man used social media to promote his gun store, posting politically charged messages that criticized the president and promoted Second Amendment rights.
But after losing ownership of his suburban Houston store in bankruptcy, Jeremy Alcede spent nearly seven weeks in jail for refusing a federal judge’s order to share with the new owner the passwords of the business’ Facebook and Twitter accounts, which the judge had declared as property.
“It’s all about silencing my voice,” said Alcede, who was released in May after turning over the information. “Any 3-year-old can look at this and tell this is my Facebook account and not the company’s.”
Alcede’s failed stand charts new territory in awarding property in bankruptcy proceedings and points to the growing importance of social media accounts as business assets. Legal experts say it also provides a lesson for business owners active in social media.
“If your business is something you feel very passionately about, it can be hard to separate those things,” said Benjamin Stewart, a Dallas-based bankruptcy lawyer. “The moral for people is you have to keep your personal life separate from your business life.”
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Jeff Bohm, who handled Alcede’s case, acknowledged “the landscape of social media is yet mostly uncharted in bankruptcy,” and cited a 2011 New York bankruptcy court case that treated such accounts like subscriber lists, which “provide valuable access to customers and potential customers.”
Other cases in the U.S. and abroad have touched on similar issues. In 2012, a South Carolina Internet company settled a lawsuit filed against a former employee it had said cost them thousands of dollars in lost business when he took 17,000 Twitter followers with him.
“You have to strike a balance between making sure people respect the court’s authority and giving people the right to make their own decision and accept the consequences if that is the way they want to go,” Stewart said.
