Court documents highlight Facebook Messenger’s feature that a Meta executive warned the company about, said: We are about to do a bad thing as a company, this is …

Newly-available court documents have revealed that senior executives at Facebook-parent company Meta internally warned the company that its plan to encrypt Facebook Messenger was “irresponsible” because it would lead to a massive drop in the detection of child exploitation and terrorism material on the platform. The internal communications, made public in a New Mexico state court case last week but were unreported, show how the company went ahead with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public push for privacy despite being fears of his top safety officials.

According to a report by news agency Reuters, in a 2019 internal chat exchange – written just as Zuckerberg was preparing to announce the shift to end-to-end encryption – Meta’s Head of Content Policy, Monika Bickert, gave a blunt take