Adding to the misinformation prevalent around end-to-end encryption, a misleading report from non-profit newsroom ProPublica recently questioned the integrity of WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption. While the collection of metadata is indeed a concern about WhatsApp, the report claimed that WhatsApp reads messages with its ‘extensive monitoring operation’.
Just like every other social platform, WhatsApp has a content moderation team to review user reports. Whenever a user reports a conversation, the last 5 messages are sent to WhatsApp for moderation. In fact, this is clearly stated in the report pop-up, as you can see in the image below:
Reacting to the report, a WhatsApp spokesperson said the following: “WhatsApp provides a way for people to report spam or abuse, which includes sharing the most recent messages in a chat. This feature is important for preventing the worst abuse on the internet. We strongly disagree with the notion that accepting reports a user chooses to send us is incompatible with end-to-end encryption.”
