Are you suggesting all messaged photos should be scanned, and potentially viewed by humans, in case it depicts a nude minor? Because no matter how you do that, that would result in false positives, and either unfair auto-bans and erroneous reports to law enforcement (so no human views the images), or human employees viewing other adults' consensual nudes that were meant to be private. Or it would result in adult employees viewing nudes sent from one minor to another minor, which would also be a major breach of those minors' privacy.

There is a program whereby police can generate hashes based on CSAM images, and then those hashes can be automatically compared against the hashes of uploaded photos on websites, so as to identify known CSAM images without any investigator having to actually view the CSAM and further infringe on the victim's privacy. But that only works vs. already known images, and can be done automatically whenever an image is uploaded, prior to encryption. The encryption doesn't prevent it.

Point being, disallowing encryption sacrifices a lot, while potentially not even being that useful for catching child abusers in practice.

I'm sure some offenders could be caught this way, but it would also cause so many problems itself.

I think it was clear what they meant.

Sure, but then everyone moved to Facebook. The monopolist changed, but not the monopolistic market and the lack of consumer choice.

And nobody gained privacy in the process (I rather think everyone lost even more of it).

The situation currently permits only a tiny number of winning companies at a time, and the userbase is locked in even as the site becomes wildly unpopular, until some threshold of discontent is reached, and then everyone moves, and then that new site also enshittifies and the cycle repeats.

Federation is a mechanism whereby people would be able to actually choose providers as individuals and at any time, instead of having to wait years for a critical mass of upset people to build up and leave [current most popular social media site], and instead of being forced to go to [new most popular social media site].

Most people couldn't tell you how their car works, at least not enough to fix it. Is that handholding, too?

People can't be knowledgable about everything. There's just too much information in the world, and too many different skills that could be learned, and not enough time.

A carpenter can rely on power tools without understanding fully how the tools work, and it's fine, as long as the tools are made to safe standards and the user understands basic safety instructions (e.g. wear protective eyewear).

To me, making sure that apps don't screw with people, even if they don't understand how the apps work, is roughly the equivalent of making sure power drills are made safely so they don't explode in peoples' hands.

It definitely ignores that many people don't have time. If someone is working over 40 hours per week, plus maybe doing unpaid labor taking care of kids or elders, where are people supposed to find the time and energy to brush up on a million different topics they don't even know they might not know enough about? Especially if they might also have medical issues, or hobbies, or want to have any time at all to relax.

Obviously, one way to improve the situation would be to make sure people are paid fairly and not overworked and have access to good and affordable or free childcare and elder-care and medical care, but corporations don't want that either. If anything, they're incentivised to disempower workers and keep them uninformed, and to get as much time out of them as they can for as little money as possible.