Posted by 1659447091 8 hours ago
It really depends on whether you think your government is more dangerous than, say, suicide trends, grooming, scamming.
I know the answer is pretty easy for US citizens to answer right now.
You can’t moderate an E2EE platform.
Obviously not in somewhere like Hacker News where there’s a clear consensus, but if you asked a random sample of the UK population “should law enforcement be allowed to compel tech companies to hand over all DMs of confirmed paedophiles?”, I’d bet very good money the majority would say “yes”.
The notion that “Big Tech” can absolve themselves of the responsibility to help law enforcement find child abusers by saying “it’s all encrypted, not my problem”, does not sit well with a large sector of the population.
Whether it’s good or bad is an ultimately political question, and both sides of the debate tend to talk past each other on this topic, but it’s undeniably a controversial point within the broader population.
https://digitaldemocracynow.org/2025/03/22/the-troubling-imp...
Most large platforms rely heavily on server-side visibility for abuse detection, spam filtering, recommendation systems, and safety tooling. End-to-end encryption removes that visibility by design. Once a platform is built around centralized analysis of user content, adding strong E2EE later isn’t just a feature toggle — it conflicts with large parts of the existing architecture.