Child exploitation watchdog says Meta encryption led to sharp decrease in tips and reports

The top U.S. watchdog monitoring child exploitation online says that a sharp drop in reports from tech companies is primarily due to Meta and its embrace of end-to-end encryption.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s annual report, released Tuesday, said the organization received about 29.2 million reports of suspected exploitation in 2024 — a drop of roughly 19% compared with the year before. 

In total, the organization received 7 million fewer reports. It’s the largest drop in the organization’s history, and only the second on record.

“When I saw the number my question was, ‘Did somebody stop reporting altogether? Did somebody go out of business or merge?’” said Yiota Souras, the center’s chief legal officer. “There wasn’t anything like that.”

Meta accounted for almost the entire decline, reporting 6.9 million fewer incidents than in 2023, according to the report. The company has been the top incident reporter to the center since at least 2019, and this year still made up over 67% of the center’s total reports. Meta’s Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform, and its WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger all rank in the top 10 largest social tech platforms by monthly active users.

In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said: “We’ll continue working with NCMEC to make our reports as valuable as possible and we expect to continue to report more than any of our peers.” Meta said that it increased the number of reports involving direct contact with minors, and noted that even in its encrypted environments, it provides users with reporting tools. 

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) is tasked by the federal government (through the PROTECT Act of 2003) to receive, process and analyze reports of online child exploitation made by tech companies and the public. Their annual report is widely viewed by child safety experts as an authoritative snapshot of what is believed to be the escalating problem of child exploitation online. Since the reports began being collected by tech companies in 1998, the numbers have increased sharply, going from fewer than a million total per year to 36.2 million in 2023. NCMEC has said that the increasing number of reports reflects a ballooning issue, but also better reporting practices.

Souras said that NCMEC’s analytics suggest that Meta’s drop in reports was almost entirely due to instituting end-to-end encryption on Facebook and Messenger. Meta has said that it embraced end-to-end encryption on the platforms to provide more safety, security and privacy for its users. The company has also stressed that it built safety measures to combat abuse and made changes to its age policies.

End-to-end encryption is a security protocol that limits platforms’ ability to analyze the contents of messages. Security advocates have praised the proliferation of the technology, but many law enforcement and child safety advocates have said that widespread use of end-to-end encryption will severely handicap the ability of law enforcement and tech companies to detect crime on their platforms.

“There is no visibility into incidents in the same way, regardless of what companies may say that they’re doing it as alternative measures,” she said. “We feel like this is the year that we were seeing what happens when companies default encrypt on social media platforms where there are kids and offenders — we lose reports.”

This year, Meta piloted a new program with NCMEC, allowing the platform to “bundle” reports, which resulted in an even lower number of total reports. NCMEC said when the bundled reports were counted in total, there was still a disparity of 7 million reports between years. 

Meta wasn’t alone in reducing its reporting numbers in 2024. NCMEC also noted that Google, X, Discord, Microsoft and the cloud software company Synchronoss all submitted at least 20% fewer reports than in 2023.