To the best of my knowledge, using Facebook as a way to serve legal papers or proving notice of a lawsuit or other legal issue has not been addressed by Pennsylvania courts, but that doesn't mean it won't in the future. Recently, two different states took two different approaches to the use of Facebook as a method of legal notice.
This month, a court in Oklahoma ruled that a woman could not use Facebook to notify the father of her child that she was pregnant in advance of putting that child up for adoption. The basic facts are that the couple had a brief sexual relationship resulting in a pregnancy. Though they had little contact with each other after the encounter, the mother sent the father a Facebook message informing him of her pregnancy. Though he claims to have never seen the message, he learned of the child's existence shortly after its birth and visited the baby for several months. He later had his parental rights terminated and the child was adopted with the mother's consent.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the Facebook message was insufficient for providing notice to the father of the pregnancy because it is not "reasonably certain to inform those affected." There is a strong dissent which basically states that the Court is being naive that Facebook is less reliable than other forms of communication and that other forms of notice (face-to-face; mail) can just as easily be ignored.
It is worth noting that Oklahoma is also where a major adoption case arose involving a Native American child arose and was ultimately adjudicated before the U.S. Supreme Court. Perhaps that case has made Oklahoma's courts particularly sensitive to issues of verifiable notice for legal actions?
The New York father had no address for his child's mother; mailed documents were returned without a forwarding address. However, the father was aware of the mother's activity on social media, including her "liking" photos on his wife's page. The judge ruled that serving the mother personally had proven "impracticable" and that the Facebook message was a viable way of contacting the other party.
These are two cases with two significantly different perspectives on the reliability of social media to effectuate notice of a legal action. How this issue will be addressed in Pennsylvania will remain to be seen, but it will clearly need to be only after exhaustive attempts to serve under the traditional methods have been taken.
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