Andy Burrows:

There is a crisis brewing that could put countless thousands of children at risk. What’s behind it? An active choice by Facebook to put its commercial interests before the fight against child abuse.

Facebook’s decision to introduce end-to-end encryption for messaging services will put children at sharply increased risk of online abuse, and will make it harder – if not impossible – for social networks to prevent children being groomed on their sites.

The scale of online harms against children is unprecedented. Last year, police recorded more than 4,000 instances in which Facebook-owned apps were used to abuse children or share abuse imagery.

There are also millions of referrals to global authorities about child abuse imagery on Facebook Messenger. And Facebook-owned Instagram is used in one in three child-grooming offences in England and Wales.

But rather than intensify its response, Facebook wants to throw its investigatory powers away. The tech giant wants to go back to the digital dark ages and, in doing so, will turn itself into a one-stop grooming shop.

Groomers will be able to work in the shadows, contacting children on the open parts of Facebook and then seamlessly begin grooming them by sending them encrypted messages that law enforcement and Facebook’s own moderators can no longer access.

Law enforcement will have to work in the dark to detect and stop abuse. More abuse, and more serious abuse, will take place, and more will go undetected. This is a scandal. It is, of course, true that Facebook is not the only platform to be moving toward encryption, and that the trade-off between safety and privacy is certainly not one with which Mark Zuckerberg alone will have to wrestle.

But what’s deeply troubling here is that, for better or worse, when it comes to child protection, Facebook is a different proposition.

On other encrypted sites such as imessage or Telegram, offenders at least need a child’s telephone number or user name to make initial contact. Of course, far fewer children have accounts on these platforms. But Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are central to most children’s lives.

And the design choices of Facebook’s sites make it all too easy for adults to contact children. When you add encryption to this mix, the results may well be chilling.

So what needs to happen? On no account must Facebook allow end-toend encryption for messages to or from children’s accounts on its apps. Adult accounts cannot be encrypted until and unless Facebook has solutions to ensure child abuse can be detected and that children’s safety won’t be compromised

The next government must take responsibility, too. Facebook’s plans for encryption are irreconcilable with the principle of a legal duty of care to children, and we need the incoming government to state that clearly.

The next prime minister should make clear that a regulator is coming, with a commitment to publishing an Online Harms Bill quickly.

How governments respond to the threat that encryption poses will be a defining moment for us all. If Facebook is allowed to get its way, the consequences for children don’t bear thinking about.