Katrina Favret, a woman from Greeneville, Tennessee, has pleaded guilty to helping run an online ring that paid people to torture monkeys on camera—and the entire operation happened through encrypted platforms owned by Meta: Facebook and WhatsApp.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, Favret and others used Meta’s messaging tools to coordinate payments, request specific acts of abuse, and distribute videos of baby and adult monkeys being tortured in Indonesia. These “animal crush videos” are illegal under U.S. federal law and represent some of the most extreme forms of cruelty imaginable.

This abuse didn’t just happen in some dark corner of the internet—it happened on mainstream platforms that millions use every day.

Meta has said nothing. They’ve done nothing. And that silence enables more abuse.

We are calling on Meta, Facebook, and WhatsApp to take urgent action to prevent their platforms from being used for illegal animal torture. Specifically, we demand:

• A public acknowledgment of how Meta-owned platforms were used in the Favret case
• Development of proactive tools to detect and block known animal cruelty content
• Creation of a dedicated team to report encrypted wildlife crimes to law enforcement
• A commitment to publish transparency data on animal abuse content found and removed.

Meta already uses powerful tools to target users with ads. There is no excuse for failing to target known patterns of animal abuse when lives are at stake.

We, the undersigned, demand that Facebook and WhatsApp act immediately to prevent further animal torture organized through their platforms. This network existed on their watch. Now they must shut it down—for good.