“Snapped and Exposed, Social Media Abuse in America’s Nursing Homes: A report on privacy violations and elder abuse posted on social media in Nursing Homes,” funded by the Colorado State Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program and compiled by Elion Caspi, PhD, with Dementia Behavior Consulting, was released October 2025.

This report follows previous reviews published in 2015 and 2017 by nonprofit newsroom ProPublica on numerous cases (stemming from 2012) of harmful photos and videos of residents that were taken by staff and posted on social media platforms, including staff in both nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

The report reviews, in-depth, 100 incidents of alarming and demeaning photos and videos of 147 older adults that were posted on various social media platforms between the years of 2017 and 2025. The incidents highlighted in the report, accessed through ProPublica’s Nursing Home Inspect website, were drawn from 100 nursing homes across 30 states and involved 154 staff and are detailed in the appendix, along with their related nursing home policy violations.

While the sampling draws from less than 1% of the nation’s nearly 15,000 nursing homes, the nature of these incidents is deeply concerning particularly given that the majority of them occurred with residents with cognitive impairment.

Following ProPublica’s 2015 review, CMS provided a memo in 2016, “Protecting Resident Privacy and Prohibiting Mental Abuse Related to Photographs and Audio/Video Recordings by Nursing Home Staff.”

The use of social media to inflict harm is not limited to aging services; it is a widespread problem of national concern. Protecting nursing home residents from abuse, and ensuring quality care, are top priorities of LeadingAge’s mission-driven and nonprofit members. The report underscores the importance of well-defined and well-communicated policies governing employee social media use.

To ensure that resident privacy and dignity are upheld and respected, all providers should conduct trainings on, and enforce policies that address abuse through social media, and regularly review and update policies as platforms and technologies evolve.

LeadingAge encourages members to review abuse prevention policies in the Abuse Prevention Toolkit. The toolkit is broadly written with the intention that it can be modified and expanded to meet an individual provider’s policy and staff training needs, including details surrounding preventing harm and violations related to social media misuse.