Scams will always be profitable. The difference between scamming someone in real life and scamming them via the internet isn’t all the much different.

It is! People are wary of scams, it’s not worth wasting an hour trying to scam one random person anymore. Spending a few hours trying to spam millions of people is a worthwhile use of a scammer’s time, especially when there’s no risk of being banned or caught.

Scammers use phone calls to scan people too. Are you suggesting we tap and monitor everyone’s phones for keywords?

That’s not a solution I would pose for that problem, no, but there are laws in place intended to reduce spam calling, and many, many tech companies are proposing many, many solutions for that, and nobody is saying “oh no, what if you accidentally classify an innocent telemarketing-spammer as a scammer?” Good riddance.

The thing about privacy is that you seem to be willing to let people or organisations (that we can’t prove have our best interest at heart) violate people’s privacy in order to get the result you want. And there’s no proof that you will get that result.

I think people should use e2ee-enabled chat services if they expect privacy. Telegram users don’t bother turning on secret chats because they lack all of the features that make people want to use telegram. I think Whatsapp users have a much more reasonable expectation of privacy, and Whatsapp still goes through efforts to reduce spam and misinformation on its platform. I think Matrix users have a more reasonable expectation of privacy (since encryption is on by default, and can be used in group chats and spaces and on calls and with every other matrix feature), but Matrix servers still do not federate with Al Qaeda rocket.chat servers, because they know better.

Meanwhile someone who’s human has to make the determination that something is criminal or something is CP and that means we have to pay people to comb through all that data.

Telegram has to. It can afford to. I’ll remind you that I did not set criminality as the bar.

That’s very taxing on the individuals involved. It does harm to them.

Now think of what it does to the rest of the people who have to see it. If you can pay one person to willingly review content for child porn that couldn’t be identified in advance so a million others don’t have to see it, is that really the worst thing?

Now I’m sure you’ll say something about expectation of privacy when submitting anything to the web. But people do have the expectation of privacy online. Take a look at people who are deliberately de-googling or up in arms about web sites collecting their data to target them with ads.

Data collection feels very different to me, but you’re specifically sending your messages to Telegram. Like, Google scanning my emails is something I have trouble objecting to (although I object to the use of that information for ad-related purposes, of course).

By “de-googling,” do you mean the whole “right to be forgotten” thing? I think that’s nonsense, clearly at odds with the right to remember, and largely used by wealthy assholes to deflect attention from shitty things they did.