Information operations directed at Hong Kong

I am curious to know how do companies like Facebook control this kind of activity on WhatsApp where there is end-end encryption. I see a lot of propaganda on Whats App being circulated everyday and people keep forwarding such messages into various groups.

Can you seriously trust WhatsApp's security now that it belongs to Facebook?

A lot more than I trust China.

It's hard, and it's an explicit tradeoff made when deciding to prioritize secure communication. One thing Facebook did with WhatsApp was limit group size and monitoring forwarding behavior (which can be done via metadata without needing to know the content), but it's an imperfect solution at best.

I don't see how you can control it.

Which makes it very worrying that lots of people get their "news" from social media now.

In fairness to Facebook (which is a phrase I never thought I'd type) Whatsapp's Signal-derived end-to-end encryption was implemented almost a year after Facebook bought it.

Of course, there's still the flaw of backups to Google Drive being unencrypted. But fortunately that's not the default setting.