Can SMS be used as evidence in court proceedings? Why?

Yes, but it should form an evidence chain with other evidence (such as registration information, call records, phone bills, etc.). ) and mutual confirmation can be accepted by the court.

In judicial practice, mobile phone short message, as a kind of litigation evidence, has been used to prove the facts of the case. The relevant judicial interpretation has clearly listed SMS as electronic evidence, and the newly revised Civil Procedure Law has also included electronic data as the type of civil evidence. However, in judicial practice, there are still "four difficulties" in the identification and application of SMS evidence.

First of all, it is difficult to confirm the text message subject. China's mobile phone number real-name registration system has not been implemented for a long time. There are still many mobile phone users who have not registered their mobile phone numbers in real name, and some mobile phone number registration owners are inconsistent with the actual users, which makes it difficult for judicial organs to accurately identify the identity information of mobile phone message senders.

The second is the difficulty in extracting SMS evidence. In practice, in addition to the parties' mobile phones, telecom operators are also important providers of SMS evidence. However, due to the imperfect laws and regulations on the transmission, storage and query of mobile phone short messages in China, and the poor timeliness of information storage, telecom operators often refuse the judicial organs' request to extract short message evidence according to law for various reasons such as protecting customers' privacy and storage cost, which has caused many difficulties for the judicial organs to extract short message evidence.

The third is that the content of short messages is difficult to verify. As a kind of digital electronic information, the formation, transmission and storage of mobile phone short messages need the help of certain electronic information equipment, and the possibility of being added, deleted, edited, tampered with, forged or destroyed in the course of operation is not ruled out, which brings difficulties to the judicial organs in accurately determining the authenticity of mobile phone short messages.

Fourth, SMS evidence is difficult to fix. The probative power of mobile phone short message evidence mainly depends on whether the parties properly save the short message and whether the evidence is preserved, and also depends on whether the existing short message evidence can confirm with other evidence. At present, there is no law to stipulate the fixed form of SMS evidence. How to effectively fix SMS evidence is also a difficult problem in judicial practice when the other party does not admit the existence of SMS.