Internal Meta communications newly unsealed in a landmark New Mexico child exploitation trial show company employees warned in 2023 that 7.5 million annual child sexual abuse reports on Messenger could disappear. This risk followed the platform's switch to end-to-end encryption, a transition CEO Mark Zuckerberg had publicly promoted as a privacy milestone.
The messages, disclosed in a civil lawsuit filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez and now in front of a Santa Fe jury, form part of a wider tranche of documents that also reveals a senior content policy executive writing in 2019 that the encryption plan was 'so irresponsible.'
