Those two things are unrelated to each other. And yes, we can do without age verification and we can have E2E encryption. Age verification is causing more harm than good. It also doesn't meaningfully help with any of the problems mentioned in the article.

Well, assuming you won't also think it's okay for Meta to just be held liable anyway.

There are people who are against age verification just on principle and others who are against it because they know any realistic implementation is going to be abused.

I think we don't want mandatory age verification or banned encryption for everything. However, you can't hide behind "it's not the law" as a shield for everything. Thanks to ubiquitous spyware, Meta knows damn well the age of almost all of its users, and if someone who's 40 is sending first-contact messages to 10 unknown 13-year-olds every day, it seems important to know what those messages say. They know this stuff is happening and they care about not being liable, not about your security.

We can assume Meta has backdoored its E2EE somehow anyway.

Why can we not have both? I don't see the assertion backed up at all.

Can we just agree we just don’t want Meta?