Facebook has announced that it has made changes across Messenger, Instagram, and Facebook for European users to comply with new EU privacy laws.

The social media platform said that the new rules prohibit messaging and calling services from “using data to prevent, detect and respond to child abuse material and other forms of harm.”

Last week concerns were raised about the new law, with some suggesting the banning of automatic detection tools on BigTech platforms could put children at risk.

According to Facebook, the European Commission and child safety experts have said that the directive does not provide a legal basis for these tools.

The BigTech company said that it is advocating for changes that will allow it to resume efforts to identify this kind of material, including analysing messaging metadata to identify patterns of abuse.

It claimed this approach would keep children safe while respecting the privacy of people’s message content.

Facebook said that to comply with the law it needed to further segregate messaging data from other parts of its infrastructure, adding that it had prioritised core features like text messaging and video calling, while ensuring most of its other features were available.

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