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As from May 8, direct messages on Instagram will no longer be protected by end-to-end encryption. Meta announced this decision on its official support page, in a short note that leaves more than one question unanswered.
The argument put forward by the company is that of low usage. A spokesperson for the group stated that very few users activate encryption in private conversations, which is why the option will be removed in the coming months. Those who wish to continue writing with end-to-end encryption, Meta added, can do so on WhatsApp.
Problem: as a number of tests have shown, the feature was never really brought to the fore: at least four menu actions were required to activate it, and it was never offered to all users. In practice, Meta is removing a feature it never really sought to develop, and which was only used by a handful of people.
End-to-end encryption is a message protection system based on unique cryptographic keys assigned to the devices involved in a conversation. The message is encrypted during transmission and can only be decrypted by authorized participants - not by the platform, third parties or Meta itself. This is the most robust form of protection for private digital communications, since even if the servers were breached, the content would remain unreadable.
With the removal of this feature, Meta will regain the technical ability to access the content of conversations on Instagram, paving the way for automated moderration, content detection via artificial intelligence and the ability to respond more easily to requests from legal authorities.
In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg stressed the importance of encryption, describing a privacy-centric vision as the inevitable future of social media networks. He wrote that not even Meta would be able to read the content of messages; seven years later, the company has radically changed course.
This is not an isolated turnaround. As the BBC reported two weeks ago, TikTok announced that it would not be introducing end-to-end encryption for its direct messages, believing that this technology could make the platform less secure by limiting its ability to detect potentially malicious activity. Two major platforms, in two weeks, choosing the same direction.
Users currently using encrypted conversations will receive an in-app notification with instructions on how to download their messages and multimedia files before the May 8 deadline. Meta did not specify whether encrypted conversations would be removed after this date.
(©GreenMe.it 2026 / Managing Editor: Selma Keshkire - The Press Junction / Picture: ©Unsplash)