Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, expressed his desire to bring advanced features similar to WhatsApp to Twitter.
He expressed his desire to improve how direct messages (DM) work on the social network. In a recent meeting with employees, he explained what that looks like.
In a presentation slide titled “Twitter 2.0” at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, Musk told employees that the company would encrypt DMs. In addition, DM will also be added encrypted video and voice calling features between accounts.
“We want to allow users to be able to communicate without worrying about their privacy, [or] without worrying about a data breach on Twitter causing all of their DMs to go to the web, or thinking that maybe someone on Twitter could be spying on their DMs,” he said. Musk in a recording of the meeting received by The Verge, quoted Friday (25/11/2022).
“That’s definitely not cool and it’s happened a few times before,” he added.
Musk was right about the DM being exposed. Because in 2018, Twitter warned that some confidential DMs between businesses and their customers could be accessed by outsiders for more than a year.
And earlier this year, the US government charged a former employee with improperly accessing user data on behalf of Saudi Arabia, though it’s not clear how DM was used or not.
Over the years, they has started and then stopped generating encrypted DMs sometimes. But now, Musk is ready to roll out encryption as a top priority for the vision he calls Twitter 2.0.
“I shouldn’t be able to see anyone’s DMs if someone is pointing a gun to my head,” she told employees.
He went on to praise Signal, an encrypted chat app run as a non-profit. He said he had spoken to its creator, Moxie Marlinspike, who now has the potential to help create encrypted Twitter DMs.
“Ironically, Moxie Marlinspike worked at Twitter and actually wanted to do encrypted DMs a few years ago, [but] was turned down and then went and created Signal,” said the world’s richest man.
