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Blame the Messenger
Child exploitation is rampant online, and Facebook’s chat platform is a big part of the problem
Facebook is many things: a social network; a conglomeration of multimedia publishing apps; and now, the world has learned, perhaps the largest mainstream distributor of videos and pictures in which children are sexually abused.
The New York Times on Saturday published a feature detailing an “explosion” in the online distribution of this kind of content, noting that Facebook’s Messenger app in particular was last year “responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material.” This report, authored by journalists Michael H. Keller and Gabriel J.X. Dance, mentions encryption 13 times, often in reference to Messenger. Facebook said earlier this year it plans to roll out end-to-end encryption on this platform by default, which will make it much harder to detect and stop the proliferation of problematic material of any kind, including footage and images of children being sexually exploited.
For all the references to encryption, the Times story doesn’t go into much detail as to why it actually matters. Essentially, end-to-end encryption makes it impossible for an intervening force, like a government or Facebook itself, to see what people are sending one another. The messages are in effect scrambled, except for the specific people sending and receiving them. Police gathering evidence against someone suspected of child abuse would thus be unable to ask Facebook for access to their encrypted communications on Messenger. By the same token, an oppressive regime would be unable to demand that Facebook provide messaging records from an activist group.
While it isn’t yet the default, Messenger already allows users to enable this kind of encryption via a “secret conversations” feature launched in 2016. The Times did not say whether any portion of the 12 million child abuse reports involving Messenger dealt with messages that were encrypted in this way.
But the story repeatedly suggests that the plan to flip the switch on end-to-end encryption by default is cause for concern, given the gargantuan role Messenger reportedly plays in distributing child-abuse material. It’s a fair enough point: If Facebook…
