Executives at Meta Platforms moved forward with plans to encrypt messaging services linked to its social media platforms despite internal warnings that the change could severely limit the company’s ability to detect and report child exploitation cases to authorities, newly disclosed court filings show.
The internal documents, filed in a lawsuit brought by Raúl Torrez in a New Mexico state court, reveal concerns among senior safety and policy officials as the company prepared to introduce default end-to-end encryption across messaging services connected to Facebook and Instagram.
“We are about to do a bad thing as a company. This is so irresponsible,” wrote Monika Bickert in an internal chat exchange dated March 2019 as Mark Zuckerberg prepared to publicly announce the encryption plan.
The filings, made public on Friday, contain internal emails, messages and briefing documents obtained during the discovery process in the case against Meta. The documents provide insight into the company’s internal assessments of the risks associated with the encryption initiative and how senior executives viewed the potential impact at the time.
Torrez’s lawsuit alleges Meta allowed online predators broad access to underage users on its platforms, enabling them to connect with victims and sometimes leading to real-world abuse and human trafficking. The case, which went to trial this month, is the first of its kind against the company to reach a jury.
The disclosures come as Meta faces mounting legal and regulatory scrutiny worldwide over the safety of young users on its platforms. In addition to the New Mexico case, a coalition of more than 40 state attorneys general in the United States has filed lawsuits claiming the company’s products harm youth mental health. Several school districts have also taken legal action, while Zuckerberg recently testified in another case brought by lawyers representing a teenager allegedly harmed by the company’s products in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
The New Mexico filing specifically accuses Meta of misrepresenting the safety implications of its plan to implement default end-to-end encryption in its Messenger service, which was first announced in 2019 and later expanded to include direct messages on Instagram.
End-to-end encryption ensures that messages are transmitted in a format that only the recipient’s device can decode, a privacy feature widely used in messaging platforms including iMessage, Google Messages and WhatsApp.
However, child safety advocates — including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children — have warned that such technology could heighten risks when integrated into large social networks where children can easily connect with strangers.
Internal Meta communications show that some of the company’s own safety officials shared similar concerns.
According to the documents, Bickert accused the company of making “gross misstatements of our ability to conduct safety operations” while promoting encryption.
“I’m not very invested in helping him sell this, I must say,” Bickert wrote regarding Zuckerberg’s efforts to promote the initiative on privacy grounds. “With end-to-end encryption, there is no way to find the terror attack planning or child exploitation” and proactively refer those cases to law enforcement.
A February 2019 briefing document cited in the filings estimated that Meta’s reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children involving child nudity and sexual exploitation imagery would have fallen from 18.4 million to 6.4 million if Messenger had been encrypted — a drop of 65%.
A later update warned the company would have been “unable to provide data proactively to law enforcement in 600 child exploitation cases, 1,454 sextortion cases, 152 terrorist cases [and] 9 threatened school shootings.”
The documents also show safety officials warning that children could be groomed through the company’s social networks before being exploited in private messaging channels.
“FB allows pedophiles to find each other and kids via social graph with easy transition to Messenger,” wrote Antigone Davis in a 2019 email evaluating the plan.
Davis contrasted the risks with WhatsApp, Meta’s encrypted messaging service, noting that it is not directly linked to a social network.
“WA (WhatsApp) does not make it easy to make social connections, meaning making Messenger e2ee (end-to-end encrypted) will be far, far worse than anything we have seen/gotten a glimpse of on WA,” she wrote.
Responding to questions from Reuters, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the concerns raised by Bickert and Davis led the company to develop additional safety features before encrypted messaging was rolled out on Facebook and Instagram in 2023.
“The concerns raised in 2019 represent the very reason we developed a range of new safety features to help detect and prevent abuse, all designed to work in encrypted chats,” Stone said.
Under the updated system, messages are encrypted by default but users can still report problematic conversations to Meta, which can then review the messages and refer cases to law enforcement where necessary.
Meta also introduced special protections for underage users, including safeguards designed to prevent adults from initiating contact with minors they do not know.
Boluwatife Enome
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