Plenty of research and news stories about this if you care to search. The speculative part of my comment is about the transcription which I'm speculating because of their fervent denials despite evidence which technically their wording in their denial statements is correct.
If I had to guess, your whatsapp messages are e2e secured but keywords are sent to facebook when they match some condition. So if you message "happy birthday" to someone, they won't see that but the fact that the keyword "birthday" was found even if the word isn't included is sent to fb. That way they can say they're not snooping your messages.
If I had to guess, your whatsapp messages are e2e secured but keywords are sent to facebook when they match some condition. So if you message "happy birthday" to someone, they won't see that but the fact that the keyword "birthday" was found even if the word isn't included is sent to fb. That way they can say they're not snooping your messages.