The incident happened before Roe v Wade legislation was overturned
Facebook reportedly handed over information to police in the US to help them investigate a teen accused of getting an illegal abortion.
Nebraska authorities requested DMs from the social media company via a warrant and Meta complied, the New York Post reported.
The messages were between the teen, who was 17 at the time of the alleged abortion, and her mum.
The Post said the DMs discussed abortion pills and a plan to take them to end the pregnancy. Nebraska’s laws around abortion permit the procedure as long as the fetus isn’t older than 20 weeks.
According to court documents, the teen asked in one of the messages: “Are we starting it today.” The mother allegedly responded: “We can if u want the one will stop the hormones.”
Her daughter later added: “Remember we burn the evidence.”
The mother and daughter were both charged after police were provided with the DMs.
The now 18-year-old has been charged with removing/concealing/abandoning a dead human body, concealing the death of another person and false reporting.
Her mother has been charged with performing or attempting an abortion greater than 20 weeks, performing an abortion when not a licensed doctor, removing/concealing/abandoning a dead human body, concealing the death of another person and false reporting.
Meta provided the information two weeks before the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade legislation in June that gave women a constitutional right to abortion.
Facebook, according to reports, is said to have had an “all hands” meeting after that decision, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked what Meta was doing to protect people who might be getting an abortion.
CyberScoop reports the company boss replied: “Protecting people’s privacy is always important, I get that this is extra salient right now [with] the Supreme Court decision and that specifically bearing on privacy.” “
But it just has always been a thing that we care about.”
Since details of the Nebraska case were made public the hashtag #deleteFacebook has been trending, with many social media users worried about how their privacy is really protected.
This case, where Facebook turned over chats of a Nebraska woman charged with giving her then-underaged daughter abortion pills, is exactly the kind that experts have warned we'd see in a post-Roe world. https://t.co/ovuGEqcgKG
— Kevin Collier (@kevincollier) August 9, 2022
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