[csmoak]

How do you look at spamming private messages to many recipients, resulting in a similar effect to posting publicly?

I know of bullying on FB where the harasser sends the same message to dozens of friends of the harassed. FB makes this easy to do since a list of someone's contacts are often easy to find online and there is no recourse to find or report these messages (as with a public post).

To me this presents a particularly tricky double-edged sword. E2E encryption is good in many cases, but tied to an easy way to send many messages and easily-accessible lists of people to target a message to, can result in a similar but more hidden version of public posts.

My guess is that this is being used today to disseminate similar content that is being restricted on public posts.

As far as I can tell, restrictions to limit the number and speed of private messages have not been effective against this kind of approach, and new accounts can always be created. In some cases, these messages go to a different "inbox" for non-contacts, but not always, and this just delays the receipt of the message since, again, they cannot be found or reported.

I don't know a good solution to this problem, but it's not one I've seen talked about.

[mensetmanusman]

There is no solution. Either you give people e2e and let them choose to do horrible things with the privilege or not.

Maybe a middle ground is that every e2e message is hashed and sent once, and if duplicate hashes are detected at scale (of the hashed message) you slow the propagation to 1 user per day.

[Quessked73]

Perhaps our expactation of privacy should depend on what platform we use, no e2e on public platforms (i.e. Facebook) but e2e on other platforms where an username/id/phonenumber is required, that can not be found easily.

I think the main problem is users mainly using only one platform for their communication instead of choosing it on a case by case basis.

[fragmede]

The limits aren't always visible. In particular, its a good idea if new accounts get heavily limited in invisible ways, and it's a moderate challenge to create mass amounts of them that don't start off shadow-banned.