I'll be blunt: I love @propublica, they have some great people, do some great reporting, they have an Onion Site even…
But this article by them is egregious, insinuating clickbait which harms the cause of end-to-end encryption, and it even admits it:
The gist is:
"Facebook promises that Nobody Else Can Read Conversation Messages! But if a Participant forwards the message to the WhatsApp Abuse Team, that's not true!"
That's all. And it's bullshit. People can forward messages to anyone, and it can still be E2E encrypted.
. @propublica dress it up, of course, with references to "Special Facebook Software" and "Artificial Intelligence" – which, yeah, when you have 2.5 billion people, some fraction of whom are submitting abuse reports, you need tools to triage and cut down on noise:
But the article is actively harmful in several ways:
1/ it conflates "abuse reporting" with "content moderation"
2/ it besmirches the WhatsApp brand name and insinuates that WhatsApp by this mechanism is not delivering end-to-end encryption:
3/ it attempts to delegitimise analysis of unencrypted metadata – e.g. patterns of behaviour, or group chatnames which mention (say) "white supremacy" keywords – in order to combat spam and other forms of abuse:
aside: this is something which I already covered at length in a blogpost:
4/ And (for the moment, finally) it attempts to brand "forwarding copies of abusive messages to safety authorities" as somehow being a breach of end-to-end encryption.
This is a BAD THING TO DO. WE NEED MORE OF THIS.
*Bad Hot Takes* like this article are exactly why I am drafting a formal test – hopefully soon to be an Internet "RFC" -for end-to-end encrypted and secure messaging – and I've already got this covered:
https://github.com/alecmuffett/draft-muffett-end-to-end-secure-messaging
We DO NOT BENEFIT when a bunch of journalists who are pissed at Mark Zuckerberg stomp in and unilaterally try to redefine end-to-end encryption.
Most especially: when they attempt to burn the only reasonable at-scale E2E-respecting approach to user safety.
I am saddened by this. The ProPublica article is a bad hot take. Shame on @propublica, @peterelkind, @jackgillum, @CraigSilverman and others.
tl;dr — "The ability to forward a message does not negate end-to-end encryption."
For more: Check out the latest Twitter discussion on:
Propublica Think That Whatsapp Abuse Reports Are A Backdoor
— with a #ReadyMadeTwitterSearch at:
Originally tweeted by Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) on 2021/09/07.
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