Is a contract made through social media binding?

Question

At my local college I've taken on a course about law and currently we are learning about contract laws and was curious about the binding nature of a contract.

Let's say there is a stock broker and his client and they are both chatting on a social media site i.e. Facebook. If the stock broker demands a yearly payment and sends a contract to his client who never signed the contract but later decides to work together and if the stock broker does not do his job correctly and the client does not want to pay the broker. is the contract that was sent on Facebook but never signed legally binding?

I was wondering if because the document was sent through a non official medium if a the client is even bounded.

I was also wondering if being silent about a contract implicate a concession to the contract?

Answer 1

The Facebook forum doesn't prevent a contract from being formed. But, for a contract to be formed there must be an affirmative agreement, not silence (at least in cases that aren't between merchants).

If they later decide to work together without reaching an agreement on the details, the draft contact could be considered, but the Facebook forum for its delivery and that fact that it wasn't expressly assented to might reduce its weight as part of the evidence in an attempt to determine what the terms of their oral or implied agreement to work together involved.

It would be very unusual for a broker not to get a signed agreement in writing to pay his fees, although an oral or unsigned agreement to pay a broker is not necessarily barred by a statute of frauds. A finder of fact would be quite skeptical of a broker's claim to have an agreement in those circumstances and often the professional regulatory provisions related to brokerages would require that fee agreement must be signed and in writing even if contract law does not require that this be done.