Text can by monitored using automated tools, however the same capability is not as well developed for video/photos.
Also, pics/videos have more impact. If I describe the results of a beating it will not have as much of an impact as the photo of the broken bleeding person will have.
So for a government that is trying to control the narrative the ability to control the images being transferred becomes key.
You might be able to catch images/videos just by the fact that suddenly a lot more data is transferred. Or part of the metadata is not encrypted, uploads might happen over a secondary connection, ...
Maybe they are constantly interrupting the connection. Text messages would go through as the connection to the server to upload a text is for a very short duration whereas the image/video would require them to be connected for a longer time and the interruption would kill the upload.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 21.5 ms ] threadHowever, this might be changing too...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-stopchat-censors-can-now...
Also, pics/videos have more impact. If I describe the results of a beating it will not have as much of an impact as the photo of the broken bleeding person will have.
So for a government that is trying to control the narrative the ability to control the images being transferred becomes key.
(This is all conjecture obviously)