The UK government says about 800 suspected child sex offenders are arrested in Britain every month on the strength of tips from social media companies. It also says roughly 1,200 children are safeguarded each month as a result. Those figures sit at the center of a dispute over end-to-end encryption, the system that lets only the sender and receiver of a message see it.
A government paper published in September 2023 laid out the case. Companies such as Meta, it said, were planning to turn on end-to-end encryption in private messaging, or already had. Today platforms scan for child sexual abuse material, which includes images, videos and grooming conversations, and report it to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. NCMEC passes the referrals to police. Encryption without safeguards would, in the paper’s words, “blind” those companies to what is being shared.
What officials are worried about
The government pointed to Facebook and Instagram, which it said account for over 85% of global referrals of child sexual abuse from tech companies. NCMEC estimates that up to 70% of Meta’s referrals could be lost once encryption rolls out on Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct. The paper warned of a “significant” drop in monthly referrals to UK law enforcement.
It cited other figures too. Police recorded almost 34,485 offences involving online indecent images of children in the UK in the year ending December 2022, up 13% on the year before. The Internet Watch Foundation found that the fastest-growing age group in abuse imagery is 7 to 10 year olds. Officials estimated up to 830,000 people in the UK could pose a sexual threat to children, and over 400,000 searches for abuse material are made in the country each month.
A YouGov poll of 1,723 adults for the NSPCC found 79% think companies should develop technology to spot abuse in encrypted apps. The same share said it should be a legal requirement.
Not a ban
The paper insisted the government backs strong encryption. “We are not asking companies to stop the implementation of E2EE,” it said, and urged firms to add child safety measures that keep up their ability to find and prevent abuse.
Meta’s existing tools, which include AI detection, user reporting and age checks for users under 13, fell short, the government argued. In an encrypted setting only content shared in public spaces would be caught, which it called a “minutia” of the total. Reporting depends on children who often do not realize they are being groomed.
The government pointed to a UK-funded Safety Tech Challenge Fund, which ran from 2021 to 2022 and showed that detecting abuse material in encrypted settings is technically feasible while protecting privacy. It also said leading UK cryptographers had written a paper on techniques that could do both jobs.
Legal pressure sat behind the appeal. Under the Online Safety Bill, Ofcom could require a company to use accredited technology, or make best efforts to develop it, against child sexual abuse on public and private channels. Firms that fail face fines of up to 18 million pounds or 10% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.
