As The Guardian wrote, Ukrinform reported that the company took such a step after facing negative user backlash for forwarding messages to the Nebraska police department.

This led to accusations that they allegedly had illegal abortions on the teenager and his mother. In June, a Norfolk police detective requested on Facebook the teen’s mother’s “profile contact information, wall posts, and friend list with Facebook IDs.” Law enforcement also sent a request for all of his photos and personal messages.

The amount of user data ultimately transferred FacebookPrivate messages, unknown but discussing how to obtain abortion pills among women, were delivered to the police.

To avoid unexpected problems, Facebook Messenger users must accept end-to-end encryption (E2E) of their messages; this is a mechanism that theoretically only allows the sender and receiver to access the content of a message.

E2E encryption is a difficult feature to implement and testing is currently limited to a few hundred users so the company can make sure the system is working properly, Facebook spokesman Alex Dzedzan said on Thursday.

At the same time, he said the move was “not a response to any request from law enforcement”.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said it plans to test in a few months. The company previously announced plans to standardize E2E encryption in 2022, but later delayed the date to 2023.