u/ImperialAle

I do a fair bit of international flying, and the airlines Ive been on offer a free "messaging only" aka WhatsApp tier for the in-flight WiFi

Ive noticed that while messages will get through on WhatsApp, images or videos will not. Even relatively small <50kb messages dont load.

My question is with WhatsApp being end to end encrypted how do they block just the images and allow the messages through.

Just curious how something like this works from a technical standpoint, as my naive veiw would be that dozens of messages or a single small image ahould look the same from the airlines point of view as its encrypted traffic.

Thanks.