NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO: Senior Meta executives pressed ahead with plans to encrypt Facebook and Instagram messaging services despite internal warnings that the move could sharply limit the company's ability to detect and report child exploitation, according to internal documents filed in a New Mexico court case.

"We are about to do a bad thing as a company. This is so irresponsible," wrote Monika Bickert, Meta's head of content policy, in a March 2019 internal chat as CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepared to publicly announce the encryption plan.

The filing, made public late last week, includes emails, messages, and briefing documents obtained during discovery in a lawsuit brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez. The case alleges Meta allowed predators access to underage users and connected them with victims, sometimes leading to real-world abuse and human trafficking. A trial began this month and is the first such case against Meta to reach a jury.

The documents shed light on how the company assessed the potential impact of default end-to-end encryption on Messenger and Instagram direct messages — a plan first announced in 2019 and rolled out in 2023.

End-to-end encryption allows only the sender and recipient to read messages and is used by services such as Apple's iMessage, Google Messages, and Meta's WhatsApp. But child safety advocates, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), have warned that embedding such encryption into social networks connecting children with strangers poses heightened risks.

The court filings show that senior Meta safety leaders shared similar concerns. While Zuckerberg promoted encryption on privacy grounds, internal communications show unease among top policy executives.

"I'm not very invested in helping him sell this, I must say," Bickert wrote of Zuckerberg's efforts. 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, she added.

A February 2019 briefing document estimated that if Messenger had been encrypted the previous year, Meta's reports of child nudity and sexual exploitation imagery to NCMEC would have dropped to 6.4 million from 18.4 million, a 65 percent decline.

A later update said Meta 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."

Antigone Davis, Meta's Global Head of Safety, also raised concerns about the company's platform structure.

"FB [Facebook] allows pedophiles to find each other and kids via social graph with easy transition to Messenger," Davis wrote in a 2019 email evaluating the risks.

By contrast, she said WhatsApp did not present the same concerns because it was not directly connected 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.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that concerns raised in 2019 prompted the company to develop additional safeguards before launching default encryption on Facebook and Instagram messaging in 2023.

While messages are encrypted by default, users can still report harmful content 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.

Among those measures were special accounts for underage users that prevent adult strangers from initiating contact.

The New Mexico case is one of several legal and regulatory challenges Meta faces regarding youth safety. More than 40 state attorneys general have brought claims alleging broader harms to youth mental health, while school districts and private plaintiffs have filed additional lawsuits. Zuckerberg testified last week in a separate case in Los Angeles County Superior Court involving a teenager allegedly harmed by the company's products.