[Thread] A former Facebook employee says Meta announced an “absurdly accelerated timeline” for e2ee messaging to preempt antitrust action and generate good PR
The Guardian's back-to-back interviews with Meta's head of safety had just established the company's public position: the global e2ee rollout won't finish until sometime in 2023. David Thiel's thread reframes that same announcement from the inside, arguing the accelerated timeline was announced for optics — a shield against antitrust pressure — not an engineering commitment.
The claim matters because the antitrust pressure it was allegedly meant to preempt did not go away: the FTC v. Meta trial later proceeded anyway, and filings surfaced showing some Meta executives warned back in 2019 that encrypting Facebook and Instagram messaging would hinder flagging CSAM to law enforcement — an internal tension that cuts against any clean privacy narrative.
First-order effects
Meta's stated 2023 encryption deadline now reads publicly as a defensive move rather than a product roadmap, inviting regulators and press to discount future privacy announcements from the company.
Second-order effects
The gambit failed on its own terms: the FTC pursued its case regardless, meaning Meta absorbed the reputational cost of a rushed promise without defusing the legal threat it was meant to blunt.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, major platforms' privacy commitments become instruments in regulatory fights — with encryption timelines set for litigation optics while internal safety tradeoffs, like the 2019 CSAM warnings, stay sealed until filings force them out.
The trend: Platform privacy rollouts are increasingly timed and framed as antitrust defenses, with the real engineering pace and internal safety tradeoffs surfacing only through later reporting and legal discovery.
this makes me sick to my stomach. disingenuous “think of the children” fud has led to Facebook / Meta delaying the roll-out of end-to-end encryption on its messaging apps. let's be perfectly clear: this delay will make children less safe, not more safe. https://www.theguardian.co…
WhatsApp doesn't recommend people to befriend and interact with. It doesn't host secret groups of unlimited size. It doesn't provide global search of every user. It doesn't group people by location or institutions like high schools. 9/
this is what is not being discussed. if measures intended to address CSAM end up leading to more teenagers in prison where they're exponentially more likely to face abuse, are we actually helping kids? there are tradeoffs with everything but we need to be real about what they are…
This is an interesting point that I had not pondered in-depth before: Discoverability in FB changes the risk calculous for messaging. https://twitter.com/...
@elegant_wallaby I'll ask the obvious but impolitic question: > But that doesn't mean that real child safety concerns are imaginary or minimal. 14/ “But are they proportionate?” - you're talking about the risks but not the benefits of making the conversation of 2.7 billion people…
For a superb thread on the complexities of the Facebook situation, see this yesterday posted by @elegant_wallaby. It's well worth reading his thoughts about the reality of the child protection challenges in this dilemma 7/15 https://twitter.com/...
The largest current industry proposal for client-side scanning involves *a personal photo library backup/sync* service. Not a social network. Not even private photo sharing. I just think that context should be added to David's thread. https://twitter.com/...
@alexstamos @zeynep It's a good point, Alex. But when encrypted “messaging” apps have 1-click invites to encrypted (sometimes very large) chats from non-encrypted platforms w/ discoverability, etc they gain the benefits of those features without accepting responsibility...
@evan_greer Every company acts in response to pressure from governments and concern about bad PR. That doesn't make their actions wrong by default. Pressure from governments and PR pressure is how safety concerns/etc. get translated into actual corporate incentives.
@zeynep @alexstamos My thought on David's argument is that “encrypted social networks have a unique abuse problem, they need anti-abuse features that other data doesn't” seems reasonable. But here on Earth 1, companies are deploying those anti-abuse features into private photo ba…
@zeynep @alexstamos ... and folks like David say “privacy advocates are being uncharitable, don't they understand this is all being driven by the special case of social networking?” But I don't think it really is being driven by social networking, or Apple's proposal wouldn't exi…
@zeynep @alexstamos So when you simultaneously have extremely powerful government agencies teaming up to demand these features *and* powerful companies showcasing those features in apps that hold private, unshared data (ie not social networks)...