That, obviously, will fail, as many (including child predators) will migrate to messengers that don't do that.
You can have E2E encryption, as that term is understood, and scan the communications, you just have to do so locally on the end devices. The example the bureaucrat gave of scanning for a URL and inserting a thumbnail is actually quite relevant and technologically similar, even if the ramifications/scale/difficulty are very different.
Whether this type of forced scanning is desirable or not is another question. We can have the debate, but if you are going to say “wow this politician is so dumb, she doesn’t understand anything technical”, then your takedown better be pedantically correct.
Also, I was really confused about the critique that (I think?) is saying the politician is dumb for thinking that some nude pictures of children are legal. But in fact this IS true, not all pictures of nude children are pornography or illegal (in the US at least). And I don’t mean that in some weaselly, CP apologist way. One famous example is the “napalm girl” photo from the Vietnam war (a Pulitzer Prize winner in fact), another more recent one are the photos those parents sent to their child’s doctor at the doctor’s behest. Or am I misunderstanding the critique here?
The informed ones anyway. They would be happy to get the uninformed ones as it still makes their numbers look better and justifies their position of weakening the internet.