After Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, he may have laid off many of the company’s trust and safety staff, but for more than a year, Twitter DM states how end-to-end encryption should be supported like a signal.
Back in 2014, Twitter considered the idea of introducing encryption to prevent hackers, tyrannical governments, and even Twitter itself from snooping on users’ private conversations, but this security feature was It never saw the light of day.
And late last week, an encrypted direct message finally on twitter…
…but not for most Twitter users…
…because Elon Musk decided that only users who paid an $8/month Twitter Blue subscription for a “verified” account could own it…
…unless the message contains images, videos or other attachments…
…does not include metadata such as where the message was sent or when it was created…
…and unless the message is being sent to a user who has not ponyed up to their Twitter Blue subscription…
…and then there’s this. In Twitter’s own words:
“As Elon Musk said, when it comes to Direct Messages, it should be the norm that if someone puts a gun to our head, we can’t access your messages. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re working on it.”
oh.
So this isn’t really end-to-end encryption.
This is because E2E encrypted messages can only be read by the sender and recipient. But Twitter can still read your messages, at least for now.
I don’t think this is a feature worth paying for. And it certainly doesn’t compete with other free E2E encrypted messaging services like Signal.
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