Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, who acquired the micro-blogging site in a $44 billion deal, has been constantly announcing changes on the platform ever since he took over. According to the Verge, Musk held a meeting with Twitter employees and detailed what he wanted from ‘Twitter 2.0’ with possible additions like encrypted DMs, possible voice and video chats.
“We want to enable users to be able to communicate without being concerned about their privacy, [or] without being concerned about a data breach at Twitter causing all of their DMs to hit the web, or think that maybe someone at Twitter could be spying on their DMs,” Musk said. “That’s obviously not going to be cool and it has happened a few times before.”
Elon Musk seems adamant towards introducing the feature as a top priority for his newly acquired company. “It should be the case that I can’t look at anyone’s DMs if somebody held a gun to my head.” he told employees. Furthermore, the feature may already be in the works as App researcher Jane Manchun Wong has previously found evidence of some code on Twitter for Android that pointed towards encrypted DMs and
Twitter is bringing back end-to-end encrypted DMs
Seeing signs of the feature being worked on in Twitter for Android: https://t.co/YtOPHH3ntD pic.twitter.com/5VODYt3ChK— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) November 16, 2022
Tesla’s CEO went on to add that Signal, the encrypted chat-app, is willing to help Twitter achieve this goal. He added that he had spoken with its creator, Moxie Marlinspike, who is now “potentially willing to help out” with encrypted DMs. “Ironically, Moxie Marlinspike worked at Twitter and actually wanted to do encrypted DMs several years ago, [but] was denied that and then went and created Signal,” Musk told employees.
Furthermore, the same meeting outlined plans to introduce voice and video calling features to the social media platform. Elon Musk said that while Signal requires users to share their phone numbers in order to use those features, Twitter won’t need that because of its accounts system, which is similar to Facebook.
Moreover, Elon Musk has confirmed that paid verification will not return to Twitter “until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation.” He added that Twitter may possibly use a “different color check for organizations than individuals” in order to counter the impersonation problem.
Holding off relaunch of Blue Verified until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 22, 2022
Will probably use different color check for organizations than individuals.
Read more: WhatsApp Desktop Will Soon Get Password Protection.
