Do judges look at your social media during a divorce?
Assume anything you post can end up in front of a judge, and do not delete what is already there. Social media is routinely used in family cases, privacy settings offer very little protection, and deleting an account after a case begins can create a bigger problem than the posts ever would have.
The second half of that is the part people get wrong.
Why privacy settings do not protect you
Your friends are the leak. Content shared with a few hundred people reaches the other side through someone who screenshots it, and that happens far more often than any formal process.
Material can be requested. Once a case is under way, the other side can ask for relevant content directly, and courts can order it produced.
Other people post about you. Being tagged, photographed, or mentioned puts you in a record you did not create and cannot take down.
So the useful assumption is not "who can see this." It is "would I be comfortable if this were printed and handed to a judge."
Do not delete
This is the counterintuitive part and it matters most.
Destroying evidence once you reasonably expect litigation has its own consequences, sometimes worse than the content. Deleting a post, wiping an account, or clearing a thread can be treated as destruction of evidence. Courts generally reserve the harshest response, assuming what vanished was damning, for deletion they find deliberate, so it is not automatic. But you do not want to be arguing about your own state of mind, and a judge who thinks you hid something will treat the rest of your account with suspicion.
One exception, and it comes first. If anything you have posted exposes where you live, where you work, or where you take the children, your safety outranks this rule. Take it down, and tell your attorney what you removed and why. Preserving evidence never comes before being safe, and the safety resources page has numbers that are free and confidential at any hour.
Otherwise: stop posting, do not delete. If you are worried about something already published, tell your attorney about it rather than removing it. They have seen worse, and they would much rather know.
What actually gets used
Posts that contradict something you have claimed: a holiday while pleading poverty, a new vehicle during a support dispute, a night out you said you were not at.
Photographs bearing on parenting: drinking around the children, who else is present during your time, the children somewhere they were not supposed to be.
Anything about the case or your spouse. Venting reads very differently printed out and read aloud than it felt when you wrote it.
New relationships, which raise the temperature more reliably than almost anything else and can complicate parenting discussions.
What to do from here
Go quiet for the duration. Not a punishment, just the cheapest possible risk reduction. Nothing you post during a divorce will help your case, and plenty of it can hurt.
Tighten settings going forward, and ask friends not to tag you or post photographs of your children.
Check what is already visible, without deleting it, so you and your attorney are not surprised by something they see first.
Keep venting offline. The urge to be understood by an audience is real, and the right audience is one trusted person or a therapist, not a platform. The mistakes that cost people most covers the wider version of this, and a private journal is the place for the raw material.
The same rules apply to your messages, and texts and screenshots are treated much the same way.
What a court will admit, and how deleting material is treated once litigation is anticipated, vary by state. If you have already deleted something you are worried about, tell your attorney rather than hoping it goes unnoticed.