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Disgusting behavior being complying with a valid warrant issued by the government?

I could understand not agreeing with the law but maybe encouraging rogue behavior could come back to bite you in unexpected and deleterious ways

They shouldn't have had access to the users private communications to begin with. It's an intentional product choice that they do, and if they chose otherwise they wouldn't have had any private messages to turn over.

Data has to be stored somewhere. You can end-to-end encrypt it, but that has constraints and adds clunkiness for the user so it's not even obviously a feature. The easy access to the web interface for messenger over whatsapp or signal if a feature of a sort, depending on your point of view. If you don't want a company to have access to the data you store with them you have to keep the encryption key yourself. If you do that, you risk losing access to the data you store with the company. That's a big downside.

So yes, it's a product choice, but it's not a product choice out of some strange effort for the company to have access to your data, but because it provides the right product mix.

You might as well argue that your bank having access to your account records to hand over is a product choice. Yes, there are ways to work around that. Maybe some blockchain variant will give that level of privacy. It will not do it without significant tradeoffs.

The primary choice there is that loss of your password doesn't mean losing your private messages. There are even ways around that, but lose your password lose your private messages isn't a terrible tradeoff particularly given that these platforms are fundamentally unable to provide the level of privacy the users casually expect. Especially since direct messages are usually used as a replacement for completely ephemeral communications (like phone calls or watercooler talk) that historically would have left not persistent record of their content at all.

If the private messaging were encrypted by default it would also be easy to offer an opt in feature that would preserve recovery (e.g. by the users software encrypting a copy of their encryption key over to the platform). I expect relatively few users would opt into it.

Imagine that back in the 80s when people regularly communicated by letters in the post if the post office offered an option to open, copy and archive all your letters, just in case you lost them. ... how many people would have opted into it? with the obvious invasion of privacy, vs just taking care to not lose whatever they intended to keep... Not zero, I suppose, but not many. And today these platforms archive and hand over communications far more casual and ephemeral than letters.

You can push back against a warrant legally. Doesn't sound like facebook cared to.

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