Facebook plans to encrypt messages will put children at increased risk of sexual abuse, warns NSPCC chief

Facebook’s plans to encrypt its services will lead to more children being sexually abused online as its boss Mark Zuckerberg puts profits and secrecy above safety, the head of the NSPCC warns on Monday.

Peter Wanless said the company, which has 1.3 billion users, was cynically going ahead with the plans even though it knew they would lead to more children being groomed and sexually abused.

"It betrays very obviously their misplaced priorities," he said in an exclusive interview with The Telegraph in advance of Tuesday's annual NSPCC conference which will focus on online child safety.

Figures, revealed on Monday, show more than 1,500 children as young as 12 called Childline last year as potential victims of online grooming or sexual abuse, a 19 per cent increase on 2017.

The charity is backing The Telegraph’s campaign for a new statutory duty of care on social media firms to better protect children from online harms.

Since the Government unveiled its plans for a duty of care, Facebook has announced it will use end-to-end encryption on its 1.3 billion-user Messenger service, meaning not even it will be able to see the content of messages.

Mr Wanless said such encryption was a "risk and a backward step" in keeping children safe online.

"It places privacy and secrecy ahead of accountability and transparency. It's really disappointing that the reaction to the NSPCC’s and young people’s call for a safer internet is to make it a lot more secret and more dangerous for them," he said.

"What I would say to Mark Zuckerberg is you have a duty of care and a responsibility to the people who are using your services, very many of whom are children and young people."

The NSPCC said Mr Zuckerberg had actually described the move as a "trade off" between greater privacy - which many users want - and increased risk of harm as "we will never find all the potential harm we do today."

Mr Wanless backed plans to make named directors legally and personally liable for what happened on their platforms so they could be prosecuted for breaches of child safety.

This should include the top executive such as Mr Zuckerberg who "clearly has an obligation and an ultimate responsibility".

"These companies make vast sums of money every year and the penalties need to be proportionate. Named directors need to be liable for their actions and inactions," said Mr Wanless.

"In other industries like financial services this is now accepted practice in terms of expecting and enforcing responsible corporate behaviour."

He feared it would take a tragedy on the scale of Molly Russell’s death to change the attitude of social media firms towards child sex abuse online. Molly committed suicide after viewing horrific self harm images on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

"The things they have done tend to react to a particular kind of crisis or tragedy," he said.

Mr Wanless recalled a meeting in February with Instagram’s boss Adam Mosseri who flew to the UK to announce a crackdown on self harm on the platform as it faced a public outcry over Molly’s death.

"I asked him about applying that approach to the grooming of children online, and the very obvious patterns of ways in which young girls with the right look will be bombarded with inappropriate messages really quickly when they set up a new Instagram account.

"I told him it was going on now. To him that was interesting. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, we probably will need to think about that,’ he said. ‘Well, we are doing self harm at the moment'."

He said social media giants were also covering up the true extent of child abuse by failing to be open and transparent with their data.  "Companies are a black box, really," said Mr Wanless. "Many of them don't publish or tell you about the scale and the scope of the dangers.

"We would like to understand that very much better the nature and what they're doing about it.

"There is resistance here and you get into this circle, where they say to us: 'Tell us where the problems are, and we'll do something to fix them.'

"And we say you're the data companies, you've got all this stuff coming out your ears, how about you tell us or tell the regulator where the issues are and what you’re doing about them."

He warned new threats were emerging, from livestreaming where NSPCC research discovered more than one in 20 primary school children using it said they had been asked to undress on it, to the way lack of regulation of the open web was leading abusers onto the dark web.

"There are a lot of really important reasons why we can and should be taking these steps on the open web to choke off routes through into the dark web,” he said.

"But we also need to understand what it is that motivates sex offenders to occupy the dark web and to engage in some of the things that they're doing there.

"People on the dark web include our neighbours, accountants, teachers, and the profile is extraordinarily different to other crimes."

Of the 1,507 calls to the NSPCC helpline in 2018/19 about online sexual abuse, a third suspected someone was developing a relationship for the purpose of sexual exploitation or grooming.