Elon Musk is continuing his quest in developing Twitter 2.0, his vision for what the company and platform can be. In a meeting with employees, the new owner of the social media company expressed how he’d like to soon roll out encrypted direct messages and voice and video chat. The news was first broken by The Verge who obtained video of the meeting.
According to Musk, Twitter’s encrypted DMs should be so secure that “it should be the case that I can’t look at anyone’s DMs if somebody has put a gun to my head.” Encrypting DMs would mean Twitter users’ communications with one another would be safe from data leaks, and Twitter employees won’t be able to access them no matter how bad they want to. “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 according to The Verge‘s report. “That’s obviously not going to be cool and it has happened a few times before.”
In order to encrypt DMs (and voice and video chats, for that matter), Musk may wind up enlisting the help of Moxie Marlinspike, creator of the encrypted messaging app Signal. Musk noted that Marlinspike had spent some time at Twitter and hoped to encrypt DMs while he was there, but later left and founded Signal afterward. Marlinspike is “potentially willing to help out,” according to Musk, although there’s no direct confirmation of Marlinspike’s involvement in the company beyond this leak.
It’s unclear when Twitter might roll features like this out. For the time being, it seems that verification through Twitter Blue is their top priority. Giving every user a blue checkmark was a priority of Mr. Musk’s once he acquired the company, but due to imposters and parody accounts, the roll-out of the new feature had to be put on pause. Musk was originally going to let users subscribe to the new $7.99/month Blue service on November 29th, but will now delay the launch yet again to ensure “there is high confidence of stopping impersonation.”
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