I also, separately, think that in aggregate Apple has incentives to make iMessage secure. While Tencent has incentives to share WeChat data with CCP.
These are among many reasons why the comparison was false equivalence. The world is not just black and white “secure vs not secure.”
What basis do you have for this certainty?
But your question is by nature setting up a false comparison. There is no observed censorship apparatus in place in the US. You can always pose "what if" scenarios about super classified efforts, but functionally there is no active system in place.
Compare this to the vastly-resourced, all-encompassing one operated openly and enthusiastically by the CCP.
Given societal norms I think there is a strong expectation that my iMessages will not be censored in the near future either.
This means there is little incentive for NSA to train and develop an actionable automatic censorship application.
Again, this is true even if they intercept, decode, analyze, commit physical action on the basis of the analysis, and store every one of my messages.
I suppose there is not really the same kind of overt deployed censorship in the US like there is in China. I do personally think that the NSA somehow gets most messages sent in the US, but I have no idea what they would do with it or if that hypothesis is reasonable.
You say the security failings of iMessage and WhatsApp pale in comparison to WeChat; I agree with parent comment and ask - in light of PRISM etc. - on what grounds can you say we should not be just as suspicious?