Ex-Meta Workers: Facebook, Instagram’s Encyrpted Tech Shields Child Predators, Allows Sexual Deviants To Target Kids
Meta is launching new encryption technology for direct messages on Facebook and Instagram amid protests by the social media giant’s former employees warning the updated system makes it more difficult to track down online child predators.
Earlier this month, the social media giant enabled “end-to-end” encryption for direct messages, which blocks anyone except the sender and receiver from viewing the contents of the communication, on Facebook and Instagram to ensure privacy protection for users.
Zuckerberg’s employees took issue with the encrypting Facebook messages when the project was initially announced in March 2019, prompting workers to resign in protest.
The 39-year-old Meta Chief Executive said at the time that “the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure.”
Former engineer director David Erb quit working at Meta in protest of the initiative. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Erb, who ran Facebook’s “community integrity” team details how adults find children to prey upon using Facebook’s “People You May Know” algorithm.
“It was a hundred times worse than any of us expected,” he told the publication. “There were millions of pedophiles targeting tens of millions of children.”
Erb warned his superiors that encrypting direct messages on Facebook would provide a safe haven for predators who preyed upon children.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone predictably downplays his company’s role in facilitating pedophilia and minimizes his former employees’ complaints about the encryption messaging.
“Former employees are entitled to their opinions, but not their own facts. The truth is, while we’d long invested in child safety efforts, in 2018 we began to restrict recommendations for potentially suspicious adults, continued ongoing efforts removing large groups of violating accounts and even supported a successful push to update the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reporting statute to cover many grooming situations, which previously had been included,” Stone said in a statement to Erb’s allegations.
As the former Meta engineer predicted,
Source: The Gateway Pundit
