I’m not sure I believe this in any way. It is taking quotes out of context, and creating an exaggeration.
I think wired is generally not out there trying to libel people. I am honesty curious why Gates has been out of the public sphere for over ten years but is suddenly out there shilling against crypto for 'the children'.
He has always been involved in a number of social issues through his foundation and have been very vocal/public about them.
Maybe we're just hearing a bit more about him and his thoughts because he's involved in looking for a way out of Covid through his foundation, and has famously 'predicted' something like this.
"The irony is that it’s digital social media that allows this kind of titillating, oversimplistic explanation of, 'OK, there’s just an evil person, and that explains all of this.' And when you have [ ] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography."
I've removed Wired's additions within brackets, and suddenly it doesn't seem at all clear Gates is talking about end-to-end encryption directly. It might be said that is the only way to accomplish his wish, but when I first read the article I thought he could as easily be talking about legal remedies as anything else.
If we can't (and I really don't think this is the case), then anti-vaxxers are the price we pay for a free and open society. To quote David Foster Wallace, there is a "baseline vulnerability" that a free society has (whether it be terrorism or the proliferation misinformation), and those that succumb to those vulnerabilities are "sacrifices on the altar of freedom." [0]
[0] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/just-as...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/bill-gates-lies-spread-faste...
>“Some of the messages on their platform, they don’t even see because of the encryption on WhatsApp,” Gates said. “In order to not have any responsibility, they’ve made that opaque. You know, so whatever the issues — anti-vaccine, child pornography — they have made sure they can’t intervene on those things.”
I personally think it's a red herring - even where there is no e2e, like on regular FB, it's extremely difficult to police user-generated content and fake news (a category that arguably includes TFA). This is just trying to whip up a storm against Gates.
It's pretty clear what his philosophical outlook is, and what he would say about ANY widely adopted use-cases of E2EE.