Is it illegal or is it just illegal on general purpose platforms whose focus isn't extreme security?
We all know Meta can still read E2EE chats (otherwise they wouldn't do it) and they're using E2EE as an excuse to avoid liability for the things their platform encourages. Contrast this with something like Signal where the entire point is to be secure.
Probably their auditors? Lying about this would be tantamount to (very serious) securities fraud. Not sure what you're basing on your allegations on besides "trust me bro"
Why would lying about having E2EE be securities (as in stock market) fraud? Would that make any lie ever told by a corporation equate to stock market fraud?
E2EE means end-to-end, where the ends are the participants in the chat. They can read it on your phone, but not on their servers. They need their app to separately transmit the plaintext to their servers to read it.
The first two E's in E2EE stand for end. From one end to the other. So no, Meta can't. Or put another way... if they can read those messages, then it's not E2EE.
We all know Meta can still read E2EE chats (otherwise they wouldn't do it) and they're using E2EE as an excuse to avoid liability for the things their platform encourages. Contrast this with something like Signal where the entire point is to be secure.