Social Media Expert Witness – Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Beyond.

Michael Simonetti BSc BE MTE, is a social media expert witness based in Melbourne, instructed by firms across Australia and internationally, including but not limited to Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Auckland and Singapore. A detailed list of the cases and firms he has represented is set out on his bio and profile page. As part of his expertise, Michael assesses social media platforms, advertising records and platform data in disputes preceding and up to the Federal Court of Australia and the State Supreme Courts.

Social media matters turn on questions counsel cannot answer from the pleadings and statements of claim. For example; Whether a post was published, and to how many people. Whether engagement was organic or manufactured. Whether an advertising campaign delivered what the platform records say it delivered, and how any of that relates to defamation, misleading conduct, and the wider commercial, industry and market position.

The Role of a Social Media Expert Witness?

A Social Media Expert Witnesses for the courts’ role includes;

Forms part of pre-briefing sessions with a legal firm or firms representing applicants, respondents, plaintiffs or defendants in cases before the courts

Is briefed by one of the legal firms representing the party(s) to produce an expert report for the court.

Produces an independent expert report, in this field it would cover aspects of social media platforms, digital advertising and online publication and may cover a wider commercial scope if briefed.

Produce a joint expert report if instructed by the court.

Potentially be part of a mediation, and / or court appearance to be cross examined by the opposing barrister(s) either individually or together with the opposing expert (“Hot Tub” format).

Michael’s expert witness work has covered over 100 reports covering these tasks extensively. Michael opines in reports and provides testimony which are “judge ready”, which allows someone with no social media or digital advertising background to follow, without losing the technical precision that makes the answer both objective and prove-able.

That is where the volume of work produced in the past and courtroom experience matters. Michael has been in court and worked through joint reports dozens of times, including conferences of experts, mediation, concurrent evidence sessions and cross examination. Over 2 decades of expert witness practice, he has built the legal acumen to hold a defensible technical position under pressure, which over and above writing the analysis in the first place.

What are typical Case Considerations of Social Media Expert Witnesses?

An example challenge in a social media defamation expert witness matter is treating a screenshot as though it were evidence of publication. A screenshot shows what one device displayed at one moment. It says nothing about who else saw the post, whether it was edited afterwards, or whether it was ever distributed beyond the person who captured it.

Material that has to be accounted for before a screenshot means anything:

• Edit history, since most platforms allow a post to be altered after publication while the URL stays the same

• Audience and visibility settings, which determine whether a post reached forty people or four hundred thousand

• Algorithmic distribution, because follower count is not reach and the two frequently differ by orders of magnitude

• Regional and personalized feed variation, which means two users viewing the same account see different content

• Inauthentic engagement from automated accounts, which inflates apparent spread without a single genuine reader

• The ease of fabrication, since a convincing screenshot can be produced in a browser in under a minute

What survives that filtering is the account of publication worth putting in front of a court. It is usually a far narrower claim than the screenshot appears to support, and it is far more difficult to challenge.

What Does a Social Media Expert Witness Assess?

Genuine customers leave reviews at irregular intervals, in their own words, from accounts with a life outside the business being reviewed. Coordinated activity does none of those things. In online reviews expert witness work, the strongest indicators are the patterns no organic customer base would produce.

• Account creation clustered into narrow windows, often days before or after a commercial event

• Posting and review timing inconsistent with the trading pattern of the business being reviewed

• Shared device fingerprints, handset identifiers or address ranges across supposedly unrelated accounts

• Repeated phrasing, sentence structure and identical spelling errors across independent reviews

• A rating distribution with no middle, which real customer bases almost never produce

• Accounts with no activity outside the target business, or outside a small cluster of related businesses

A single one of these proves little. A cluster of them, in a data-set that has already been filtered for ordinary platform behaviour, is a finding that stands up under cross examination.

What Material Does an Expert Need Access To?

The categories below indicate the material typically sought in a social media matter. The specific list is always shaped by the platforms involved and the issues pleaded.

• Platform data exports. Native account downloads covering posts, messages, edits and deletions.

• Advertising account records. Campaign objectives, targeting parameters, audience definitions, spend, delivery, reach and impressions.

• Page and account administration logs. Role changes, access grants and administrative actions with timestamps.

• Post history. Edit records, deletion records and archived versions of the content in issue.

• Analytic and insights exports. Platform reported reach, impressions and engagement for the relevant period.

• Preservation correspondence. Records of preservation requests and any platform legal process already issued.

• Review platform records. Review text, timestamps, reviewer account data and any removal or moderation history.

• Account access records. Login history, device and location data where the platform retains and releases it.

For Example: Reach, Publication and the Extent of Harm

The extent of publication is frequently assumed rather than established. An account with two hundred thousand followers may have delivered a given post to three thousand of them. Follower count measures potential audience, not actual distribution, and the gap between the two is where most defamation reach arguments are won or lost.

The technical question is what the platform’s own delivery records show: impressions, unique reach, the proportion of that reach inside Australia, and how much of it came from paid promotion rather than organic distribution. Those are measurable figures held by the platform, not estimates.

Whether that extent of publication is sufficient for the elements counsel is pleading is a matter for the court. The role here is to establish the numbers accurately, with their limitations stated, so the legal argument rests on evidence rather than on follower count.

For Example: What Social Media Analysis Cannot Establish

Stating the limits is part of the job, and a report that overstates its reach damages the case it was written to support.

• Platform data does not identify who was physically at the keyboard. It attributes activity to an account, and account attribution is not authorship.

• Reach and impression figures are platform reported. Platforms define these metrics differently, change the definitions without notice, and do not publish the underlying methodology.

• Deleted content is frequently unrecoverable without formal platform legal process, and its absence from an export does not establish that it never existed.

• No technical analysis can establish how an ordinary reader understood a post. Meaning and imputation are matters for the court.

• Automated sentiment classification is probabilistic. It is useful for identifying volume and direction across a large data-set, not for characterizing any individual post.

Courts and Typical Matters

Michael Simonetti has appeared in, or prepared expert reports and expert witness reports for, the courts below. These courts sit in multiple cities and regions across the country.

• Federal Court of Australia. Defamation, misleading and deceptive conduct, corporations, intellectual property, competition, insolvency and significant commercial disputes involving federal law.

• Supreme Court of Victoria. Major commercial litigation, large contractual disputes, shareholder and director disputes, injunctions and defamation.

• County Court of Victoria. Commercial disputes, contractual claims, damages claims and some defamation matters.

• Magistrates’ Court of Victoria. Lower value civil and commercial disputes.

Social media matters most often proceed as defamation, which is heard at several levels depending on the parties and the quantum. Where the conduct is pleaded as misleading and deceptive, or as involving competition or intellectual property, the matter generally proceeds in the Federal Court of Australia.

Reports, Conferences and Concurrent Evidence

Over the past two decades Michael has applied both software engineering and commercial business skill sets to this work. Understanding a matter beyond the statements of claim has proven valuable for firms responding to briefs, preparing cases, and defending a position through joint reports, concurrent evidence sessions and cross examination.

Michael Simonetti holds degrees from Melbourne University in Computer Science and Engineering, together with a Masters in Telecommunications Engineering. He has 30 years of experience in software engineering, internet marketing and digital, including 30 years working commercially as the head of his own digital agencies. Over the past 15 years he has built a client portfolio comprising hundreds of legal professionals.

Firms who have instructed him include King & Wood Mallesons, Gadens, Allens, Herbert Smith Freehills, Thomson Geer, Gilbert + Tobin, Cooper Mills, Buchanan, Sterling and Gilchrist Connell, among others. Applicants and respondents range from small businesses and SMEs through to multinational corporations, across real estate, legal, hospitality, professional services, medical, travel, B2B and B2C sectors.

Services range from initial advice through to reports, affidavits and court appearances.

Interstate and International Instructions

Michael Simonetti has worked with clients and courts in New Zealand, Asia, Europe and the United States. Social media disputes routinely cross jurisdictions, since content published in one country is read, and gives rise to claims, in another.

He travels frequently for this work, although most briefings and meetings are held online, which keeps a social media expert witness instruction practical for firms in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth or overseas.

Instructing Michael Simonetti

An initial call establishes the technical questions genuinely in dispute and clears any conflict. Where the matter is at an early stage, that call is also the point at which discovery categories and materials can be scoped so the evidence that matters is actually captured. AndMine coordinates the engagement, and can arrange contact with an expert witness reference on request. For more information, please contact Michael Simonetti at AndMine.