“Delete Facebook” has been trending trended online since August 9 after the police in United States used private chats obtained from the social media site to prosecute a teenager for an abortion.

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Forbes reported that a Nebraska teenager is facing criminal charges for allegedly abortion a foetus in violation of state law after authorities obtained her Facebook messages using a search warrant.

The 17-year-old girl, who is being tried as an adult along with her mother Jessica Burgess, is awaiting trial in Madison county district court on charges that they broke a Nebraska law banning the abortion of pregnancy after 20 weeks.

Nebraska currently outlaws abortions beyond 20 weeks.

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The teenager and her mother were charged in July with allegedly removing, concealing, or abandoning a dead human body and concealing the death of another person.

It is understood that this followed after the Norfolk police department received a tip claiming she had miscarried in April at 23 weeks of pregnancy and secretly buried the fetus with her mother’s help.

The teenager had told police that she had suffered a miscarriage but the latter continued to investigate the matter, ultimately serving Facebook with a search warrant to access the teenager and her mother’s Facebook accounts.

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It was gathered that the police subsequently found messages between the mother and daughter allegedly detailing how the teenager had undergone a self-managed abortion with Jessica’s help.

On Tuesday, users of Facebook in the United States took to Twitter en mass to call for a cancelation of the platform.

In response, Andy Stone, spokesperson of Facebook’s parent company Meta, argued that the chats were made available to the police based on a warrant containing charges relating to a criminal investigation, not abortion.

“Nothing in the valid warrants we received from local law enforcement in early June, prior to the Supreme Court decision, mentioned abortion,” the spokesperson wrote.

“The warrants concerned charges related to a criminal investigation and court documents indicate that police at the time were investigating the case of a stillborn baby who was burned and buried, not a decision to have an abortion.

“Both of these warrants were originally accompanied by non-disclosure orders, which prevented us from sharing any information about them. The orders have now been lifted.”

Four US states ban abortion at 24 weeks while more than a dozen broadly ban it at the start of pregnancy.

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