US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

Surprised pikachu face

Of course they can. Why wouldn't you assume this to be the case?

if anybody believes that Facebook would allow people to send a totally encrypted message to somebody, they're out of their mind. they're pretty much in bed with law enforcement at this point. I mean I don't know how many people have been killed in Saudi Arabia this year for writing Facebook messages to each other that were against what the government wanted but it's probably a large number.

This should surprise nobody. Do you really think that the intelligence agencies of the US etc would allow mainstream E2E encryption? Please stop being so naive

It's vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, and the man-in-the-middle happens to be Meta.

The tricky part would be doing it and not getting caught though.

yes, this is a very known fact that it is not E2EE but Client2Server Encrypted. Otherwise your message history wouldn't work.