Meta executives moved forward with a plan to encrypt the messaging services linked to its Facebook and Instagram apps in spite of internal warnings that doing so would make it more difficult for the social media behemoth to report child-exploitation cases to law enforcement.
“As a firm, we’re going to do something horrible”. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg was about to make the idea public in March 2019, Monika Bickert, Meta’s head of content policy, stated in an internal chat session, “This is so irresponsible.”
Emails, messages, and briefing documents obtained in discovery for a lawsuit filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez are included in the filing, which was made public on Friday but had not been previously reported.
These documents provide new insight into the company’s assessment of the plan’s impact and the opinions of senior policy and safety executives at the time.
The petition, which was made public on Friday but had not been previously published, contains emails, messages, and briefing documents collected in discovery for a case filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez.
These records offer fresh perspectives on how the business evaluated the plan’s effects and what senior policy and safety executives thought at the time.
Torrez claims that Meta regularly led to actual abuse and human trafficking by providing predators with free access to youngsters and connecting them with victims.
The trial began this month and is the first lawsuit of its kind against Meta to proceed to a jury. The disclosure coincides with a global upsurge in legal action and regulatory concerns pertaining to the safety of minors using Meta’s.
A coalition of over 40 attorneys general is pursuing allegations that the company’s goods negatively impact teenage mental health in general, in addition to New Mexico’s action, which centres on the company’s alleged inability to address child predation.
\While Zuckerberg testified last week in a new case filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court by lawyers representing a kid who claims to have been injured by the company’s goods, several school districts are also suing the business.
In particular, Meta is accused in the most recent filing in the New Mexico lawsuit of misrepresenting the security of its intention to introduce default end-to-end encryption on its Messenger service, which is tied to Facebook and was first introduced in 2019. Later, the service was extended to include Instagram direct messages.
RISK ELEVATION
End-to-end encryption, which entails sending a message in a format that can only be decoded by the recipient’s device, is a typical privacy feature of many messaging apps, including as Meta’s WhatsApp, Apple’s, iMessage, and Google’s Messages.
However, proponents of child safety, such as the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), have contended that the technology is more dangerous when it is integrated into public social networks that easily introduce kids to strangers.
The same anxiety is expressed by senior Meta safety executives in the New Mexico filings.
Top safety and policy executives expressed dismay internally, despite Zuckerberg’s public claims that the company was addressing the plan’s risks.
Bickert, the head of content policy, claimed the company was making “gross misstatements of our ability to conduct safety operations,” according to the documents.
Regarding Zuckerberg’s attempts to advance encryption on privacy grounds, Bickert said, “I must admit that I’m not very interested in helping him sell this.” “There is no way to find the terror attack planning or child exploitation” with end-to-end encryption, she continued, adding that those cases cannot be proactively referred to law enforcement.
According to a Meta briefing document in an email from February 2019, if Messenger had been encrypted, the company’s total reporting of child nudity and sexual exploitation imagery to the NCMEC the year before would have decreased by 65%, from 18.4 million to 6.4 million.
ADDITIONAL SAFETY FEATURES
Before launching encrypted messaging on Facebook and Instagram in 2023, Meta worked on additional safety features in response to concerns raised by Bickert and Antigone Davis, Global Head of Safety.
Although messages are encrypted by default, users still have the option to report offensive messages to Meta for review and potential referral to law enforcement.
“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.
Special accounts for underage users were created to stop adult users from contacting minors they do not know.
The possibility of youngsters being groomed on the company’s semi-public social media platforms and then exploited on its private messaging services was particularly brought up by safety executives.
In a 2019 email evaluating the plan’s hazards, Davis stated, “Facebook allows pedophiles to find each other and kids via social graph with easy transition to Messenger.”
In comparison, she argued, Meta’s current encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, did not have the same problems because it was not directly linked to a social media site.
“Making Messenger e2ee (end-to-end encrypted) will be far, far worse than anything we have seen/gotten a glimpse of on WA because WA (WhatsApp) does not make it easy to make social connections,” she stated.
