In one of the first cases where police have used a citizen’s private Facebook messages to indict them, a teenager in Nebraska is facing criminal charges for allegedly aborting a foetus, in violation of Nebraska’s law which currently makes abortion beyond 20 weeks illegal.
Earlier this week, Nebraska’s Republican lawmakers were unsuccessful in their attempts to secure enough votes to narrow that window down to 12 weeks.
First reported by the Lincoln Journal Star, Celeste Burgess, 17 and her mother Jessica, 41, were charged with allegedly removing, concealing or abandoning a dead human body and concealing the death.
Jessica had allegedly helped her daughter abort, burn and bury her foetus. She now faces five criminal charges, including three felonies.
In April, Norfolk Police Department launched investigations into the pair’s actions after they received a tip that suggested Celeste had miscarried and buried the foetus with her mother’s aid.
Investigators then obtained Celeste’s medical records, which indicated she’d been more than 23 weeks pregnant at the time, and was expected to deliver in early July.
Celeste informed the police that she had suffered a miscarriage. State authorities then went on to serve Facebook with a search warrant to access Celeste and her mother’s Facebook accounts.
There, they discovered messages between the pair, allegedly describing how the 17-year old had conducted a self-managed abortion with her mother’s help.
In June, employees at Facebook parent Meta asked their CEO Mark Zuckerberg how the company was going to protect individuals seeking abortions.
“Protecting people’s privacy is always important,” Zuckerberg replied, according to CyberScoop.
“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.”
One media publication reported that Meta’s Vice President of HR, Janelle Gale, told employees they were forbidden to discuss abortion at work.
Apparently, their reason was that there would be “an increased risk” that the company would be seen as a “hostile work environment.”
Gale reportedly said abortion was “the most divisive and reported topic” by employees on Workplace, an internal type of Facebook. She reportedly said “even if people are respectful, and they’re attempting to be respectful about their view on abortion, it can still leave people feeling like they’re being targeted based on their gender or religion.”
“It’s the one unique topic that kind of trips that line on a protected class pretty much in every instance.”
The following month, Meta joined several companies including Paramount, Microsoft and Salesforce, in announcing they would help employees pay the cost of travel in order to seek an abortion in another state.
In the same month, Facebook and Instagram began systematically removing posts that offered abortion pills to individuals who could not access them.
An investigation conducted by The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Markup revealed that Facebook was collecting personal data about abortion seekers and letting anti-abortion organisations use that data to target and affect people online.
Policy Communications Director at Facebook and Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, told Forbes he could not comment on the details of the criminal case involving Celeste Burgess and her mother.
In June, Stone told the Washington Post that the company “carefully scrutinise[s] all government requests for user information and often push[es] back, including in court.”
Celeste and her mother are currently still awaiting trial in Madison County District Court.