How to Read Facebook Messenger message_1.json Files

How to find and open the file

What the file looks like

{
  "participants": [ { "name": "Dana Reyes" }, { "name": "Sam Ortiz" } ],
  "messages": [
    {
      "sender_name": "Dana Reyes",
      "timestamp_ms": 1710466867000,
      "content": "Are you picking up the kids?"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Dana Reyes",
  "thread_path": "inbox/danareyes_1234567890"
}

• sender_name is who sent the message and content is what it said.
• timestamp_ms is the time as a count of milliseconds since January 1, 1970 in UTC. It is a 13-digit number. Convert it with a tool such as epochconverter.com, and state the time zone you converted to.
• Photos, videos and voice messages have no content. They have a photos, videos or audio_files entry pointing to a file in the same folder.

The newest message is first

Messages are listed newest first, the reverse of how you read a chat. A long conversation is split across several files, and the numbering runs the same way: message_1.json holds the most recent messages and the highest-numbered file holds the oldest. To read the conversation from the beginning, start at the bottom of the last file.

Why emoji and accented letters look garbled

In these files an emoji often shows as a run of odd characters, and a name like José shows as José. The text is not damaged. Facebook writes each byte of the text as a separate character, so anything outside plain English letters comes out wrong until it is decoded again. Verity does that decoding when it reads the file. If you are reading it yourself, be aware that what you see may not be exactly what was sent.

Recent chats may be missing

Messenger now uses end-to-end encryption for personal chats, and those messages are not in message_1.json. Facebook provides them through a separate download, which Meta says is available only on a computer: open facebook.com, click Messenger, click Options next to Chats, then Chat history, then Last backup, then Download chat backup. Meta describes the steps here.

So if the last message in message_1.json is much older than the last message you can see in the app, the rest is in the encrypted backup. That download is laid out differently, and Verity does not read it yet. Verity reads the standard message_1.json described on this page.

If you have not requested the download yet, the steps are in How to Export Messenger and Instagram DMs for Court.

This is general information, not legal advice. Verity is not a law firm, and requirements for authenticating a digital record vary by court — talk to an attorney about what your case specifically needs.