Meta faced internal warnings and pushback prior to implementing end-to-end encryption on its messaging services for Facebook and Instagram, with leaders internally warning that the technology could hinder their ability to detect instances of child exploitation and provide evidence to law enforcement, new court documents reveal.

The previously unreported documents were filed in a court case brough up by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, who brought the case against Meta, alleging the company made it easy for predators to reach underage users via their platforms, often leading to abuse offline and even cases of human traffiking.

In the newly released document, Meta’s head of content policy wrote on March 2019 shortly before CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the encryption plans publicly: “We are about to do a bad thing as a company. This is so irresponsible.”

The court case will seek to determine whether Meta misrepresented the safety of its plan to ⁠implement default end-to-end encryption on its Facebook-connected Messenger service.

Documents, emails, and messages revealed in the filings shed new light on the internal awareness in Meta of the potentially detrimental effect its policies and design could have on child safety.

The revelations come as Meta continues to face lawsuits across the US alleging that the design of its social media platforms is harmful to children. Allegations include from these lawsuits posit that Meta purposefully targets teens and younger children, had addictive designs, and adversely affects the mental health of young people.

The New Mexico case, however, differs from these, as its scope centres on Meta’s implemetnation of end-to-end encryption on its direct messages on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta first announced its use of end-to-end encryption to Messenger in 2019, and later expanded the tech to direct messages on Instagram.

End-to-end encryption has long been a source of much debate in the tech world – while it undeniably offers more privacy to people as companies and law enforcement cannot access messages without permissions or personal ‘keys’ to encrypted data, they have also presented a security liability in another sense.

Law enforcement had routinely said that their investigations into child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, drug and weapons trades, and terrorist activity have been hampered by the technology.

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In end-to-end encryption, a senders message can only be viewed by its reciepient and is coded in such a wya to protect it from being deciphered in transfer. The tool is commonplace now, with Apple, WhatsApp, and Google Messages offering the privacy setting by default.

The tech came into sharp focus as the Online Safety Act was being drafted, as policy makers in the UK toyed with the idea of mandating a ‘backdoor’ to encryption which would enable law enforcement to preemptively scan messaged for illegal or harmful material prior to it being encrypted and sent, a proposal that privacy experts assessed harshly, saying that such technology did not exist and negated the idea and importance of encryption.

While the Online Safety Act did not stipulate an encryption ‘backdoor’ in its final form, the Home Office did allegeldy issue Apple a secret order to create a ‘backdoor’ to its encryption tool used in its cloud backups, Advanced Data Protection (ADP). Apple appealed the order, and instead of complying, removed the service completely from UK-based users.