"The state has no business listening in on private citizen's communication."

The absolutely do, depending on circumstances.

So primary is this concept of privacy, that it requires an entire legal framework, evidence of potential wrongdoing, proof that there is no other method to achieve the goal of validating guilt, proof that the crime is severe, and not a hunting expedition, approval via a warrant after a judge has examined that evidence, and strict controls around the entire usage of that warrant.

Wikipedia says:

Lawful interception is officially strictly controlled in many countries to safeguard privacy; this is the case in all liberal democracies.

Using this edge case as "depending on circumstances" is clearly not the generic I was referencing. The statement that

"The state has no business listening in on private citizen's communication."

Is valid, correct, accurate. Listing edge cases, is not invaliding the rule. It is the exception to the rule, and considering the sheer volume of communication, compared to the volume actively tapped in a legal means, it is the most edge case of edge cases.

There is no reason I would deem a mega-corp to somehow be OK to do what I would demand the state not. That our democratic societies have deemed that our states should not.

To highlight that, the phone companies of old would be in infinitely hot water, should they listen to communication between customers, in any fashion.

A platform is not a parent, should not police, should not act as an arm of the state, or as an arm of parents, except as I stipulated, by direct request of the parents, and only to enable the parents to be a guardian. Under no circumstances should that involve the platform scanning anything, instead, the platform could simply give parents direct access to a child's account.

" that it requires an entire legal framework, evidence of potential wrongdoing, proof that there is no other method to achieve the goal of validating guilt"

No it doesn't.

Life is no Reddit, lawyers and technicalities.

It's made up of regular people in communities.

If you see some guy creeping on 10 year-olds, you can notify the police and Facebook will do that as well - for the same reason.

It may not at all need to involve 'state surveillance', and Meta can probably hand over whatever they want to the police in that circumstance.

The police can make a decision as to how to proceed.

A bit like if someone was harassing someone on the street.

Or if an unknown person starts hanging out outside by a schoolyard in a way that seems inappropriate.

We don't want to transgress people's rights but we also are going to look at 'negative signals'.

You build the strallman to destroy. We are not talking state, we are talking the social network which advertises itself as safe to children, absolutely has metadata for approximate age and social connections, where one can identify as minor deserving protections, and which social network prefers to increase engagement at *any* cost to its users.