[cameronperot]

> if you're caught making a joke about ISIS, the Whatsapp police can unencrypt your messages

Would you please clarify this? I know that messages flagged by the recipient can be read by moderators [1], but I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at here.

I'm not defending WhatsApp (I've advocated for Signal since the days of TextSecure), but AFAIK the messages are encrypted using the Signal protocol, so I'm not sure how the "WhatsApp police" would be able to determine if you said something specific without the recipient reporting it.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/whatsapp-end-to-end-...

[sysadm1n]

Yes I was referring to this when I meant the `Whatsapp police`. I actually tried to dig up the article to backup my claims, but was at a loss, since I didn't bookmark it.

So in this case we have Whatsapp users essentially snitching on each other and getting posts flagged for the purposes of law enforcement, and having those message unencrypted. Whilst this is largely helpful, there is the potential for false positives (e.g a meme about ISIS getting flagged as 'extremist' and 'violent')

It's a tricky one, because although the feature may help save lives and such, I am just uncomfortable with it, since the E2E encryption is slightly broken because of this mechanism in place.