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Turn it over to law enforcement. A single chat message is rarely a crime, but can be used to find further evidence of crime.

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Turn what over to law enforcement? The ciphertext and timestamp?

A statement from the user who submitted it, including their unverifiable copy of the offensive message. The law is not computer code. They don't need to break ciphertext to get a warrant.

You can do this thing called "message franking" to make it more verifiable, if you want.

The downside is, context matters. If you report messages out-of-order or with important context deleted, you can trick investigators into thinking something was said or implied that actually wasn't. It needs to be carefully designed.

(I blog about cryptography, but you should ask a cryptographer if you want to design something like this.)

I don't design message apps. I just know that law enforcement did just fine before the internet when most communication (face to face, over the phone) wasn't recorded or verifiable.

If we’re talking about content that you literally don’t have access to and can’t see because it’s encrypted, like iMessage or Signal then you don’t need Section 230 protection because you aren’t moderating content.

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