Facebook’s encryption risks children’s safety, says the National Crime Agency.
The social media giant’s move to secure messaging from end-to-end - meaning that only the sender and the receiver can view them - could hinder criminal investigations regarding minors by 92 per cent.
In response, Meta - the social media platform’s parent company that also owns and operates Instagram and WhatsApp - shared their plans to use Artificial Intelligence to flag inappropriate content.
They said they would "proactively detect accounts engaged in malicious patterns of behaviour instead of scanning private messages".
The Mark Zuckerberg-founded company - which permits children over the age of 13 to have profiles - would also allow users to flag unsuitable and abusive content.
This comes after they declared they would bring in “default end-to-end encryption” for all personal chats and calls to guarantee a more “secure and private service”.
Following this, the NCA’s Rob Jones dubbed their platform as “not as safe as it was for children”.
He added that parents ought to “think very carefully” about letting their kids onto the site.
They have previously expressed concern that sexual predators will “masquerade as children” to get into contact with children posing as an adult, which is a view shared by the UK government.
In September, the then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman revealed that collaboration with social media companies led to the arrest of more than 800 people a month and safeguards more than 1,200 children from child sexual abuse.
Of their decision, Meta said: "As we roll out end-to-end encryption, we expect to continue providing more reports to law enforcement than our peers due to our industry-leading work on keeping people safe."
Meta states that encryption - which the UK government appears to support - stops other online criminals like hackers and fraudsters from getting their mitts on private messages and is working on other ways to protect kids.
