It's really more about being able to trace accounts to people period, as allowed through the Patriot Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Title_II:_Enhanced...

Child pornography gets held up to the public a lot because it's a crime nobody can defend and walk away the same they were, no matter what you say. If you publicly contest this move for privacy reasons, you're automatically defending the worst child molester someone's mind can come up with.

It isn't just that. People will cherry-pick the worst incident that ever happened on a platform involving children and compare everything else to that and say that if you support privacy you're supporting this everywhere.

The one, admittedly terrible incident, will shock people and they will push exaggerated means to "stop" it. Ones which just so happen to feed tons of information into the NSA machine.

People come up with stories of live-streamed child pornography too but do these children live in some parallel universe where crimes can be committed against them without recourse? What is the police doing? Did they not find suspicious behaviour in a neighbourhood? Did a counsellor not pick up on it?

Yeah sure, child pornography is awful but why is this part of the equation the only one that is ever mentioned? Why is it always about encryption or anonymity?

If I recall from their even more previous statement, it was already E2EE, but that turned out to be a lie...