You may be underestimating the size and scope of some of the big WhatsApp channels. Beyond a certain point they really look like a traditional social network, a

You may be underestimating the size and scope of some of the big WhatsApp channels. Beyond a certain point they really look like a traditional social network, and not an isolated group of people sharing something in common. As an example; the official Valorant Discord server has 200,000 people online right now. Not total; online, actively receiving messages. Some of these private WhatsApps, Discords, etc have tens of thousands of active members, and the content shared goes far, far beyond whatever the title of the channel indicates. The companies behind these isolated social network islands may do some light moderation on the overall server/channel, like not allowing terrorist groups to communicate, but very very rarely do they moderate any deeper; that's left up to the owners of the channel/server, and if they're complicit, it'll never be cleaned up. Of course, WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, etc, they don't do discovery. They just let third parties handle that [1]. They get a ton of plausible deniability, which is even further empowered by the push for E2EE. [1] https://top.gg/servers/list/top https://top.gg/servers/list/top