Priti Patel says Facebook and Instagram risk a "grotesque betrayal" of children.
The 50-year-old politician - who has served as Home Secretary in the UK since 2019 - blasted the Meta-owned social media apps as having the "inadequate protections" in place for children and urged the company to work with the Home Office to keep children safe online.
Writing in The Telegraph, she said: "The consequences of inadequate protections - especially for end-to-end encrypted social media platforms - would be catastrophic. A great many child predators use social media platforms such as Facebook to discover, target, and sexually abuse children. These protections need to be in place before end-to-end encryption is rolled out around the world."
However, the Conservative party member went on to insist that there is a "way forward" for the matter and argued that keeping children safe would even be in the "financial interests" of apps such as Facebook and Instagram.
She added: "It would be completely unacceptable - indeed a grotesque betrayal - for anyone to say this is all too difficult or that it doesn't really matter. But while some things are more important than profits, it is actually in the financial interests of technology companies that the public should have confidence that their products and services will not be used to hurt children."
Meanwhile, a representative for the social media giants stressed that there is "no tolerance" for any harmful behaviour to children on the apps and insisted that they are "focused" on finding a solution.
A spokesperson added: "We have no tolerance for child exploitation on our platforms and are focused on solutions that do not require the intrusive scanning of people's private conversations. We want to prevent harm from happening in the first place, not just detect it after the fact. We continue to work with outside experts and law enforcement to help keep people safe online."
