On February 24, 2026, unsealed court documents from a New Mexico state lawsuit revealed that senior Meta executives privately viewed the company’s plan to encrypt Facebook Messenger as “irresponsible.” The filings include a 2019 message from Monika Bickert, Meta’s head of content policy, stating, “We are about to do a bad thing as a company,” as she prepared for CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public announcement. Executives feared that default end-to-end encryption would blind the company to child exploitation and human trafficking occurring on its platforms.
Meta executive warned Facebook Messenger encryption plan was ‘so irresponsible’, shows court filing https://t.co/w2ErloyCzW https://t.co/w2ErloyCzW
— Reuters (@Reuters) February 24, 2026
Internal briefing documents estimated that if Messenger had been encrypted in 2018, reports of sexual exploitation imagery to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children would have plummeted by 65%. Furthermore, Meta analysts warned that the company would have been unable to proactively alert law enforcement in hundreds of cases involving sextortion, terrorism, and threatened school shootings. Antigone Davis, Meta’s Global Head of Safety, noted that Facebook’s social nature makes it far more dangerous for grooming than WhatsApp, as predators can easily find children through the “social graph” before moving to private, encrypted chats.
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In response to the filings, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone asserted that these 2019 concerns were precisely why the company delayed the full rollout until late 2023, allowing time to develop new safety features. These include restricted accounts for minors and tools that prevent unknown adults from initiating contact. However, the New Mexico Attorney General argues that Meta knowingly prioritized privacy branding over child safety, marking this as the first such case against the tech giant to reach a jury trial.
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