Meta has a way to read your E2EE messages. I don't know what it is, but if they didn't then they wouldn't do it.
There's a difference between E2EE between friends who want to remain secure, and E2EE between strangers in an attempt for the platform to avoid legal liability for spam.
> Another poster child for Meta's lobbying (bribery) to encourage OS level age verification. (numerous recent references in HN posts)
The references I saw showed Meta had lobbied for some of the laws that require age verification be done by the site or by third party ID services. They did not show that Meta lobbied for any of the OS bills.
Some showed that Meta had lobbied in some of the states with those bills, but they just showed Meta's total lobbying budget for those states.
That's why Signal requires a phone number. You can't talk to people you don't know because complete strangers don't give you their phone number. And if you do spam random numbers, they'll report you to the police and you can be tracked down based on your identifier, which still doesn't leak the chats between you and people you actually know.
They very much want to push this liability off onto someone else...
As far as end-to-end encryption, on SM sites (social media or SadoMasochism, however you want to read it) I don't really see the need.