Review
Twitter’s shift to full DM encryption is a step closer, with the new screenshots showing exactly how encrypted messages will function in the app.
As you can see in this image, posted by Twitter designer Andrea Conway, you’ll soon have a slider that you can use to switch on DM encryption in the app, providing additional privacy protection for your chats.
Within each encrypted chat, you’ll also be able to access the specific cryptographic key for that conversation, giving you more insight into the security coding for each, and another means to ensure that your conversations are contained to you and the recipient.
In addition to this, users will also see a notification in their chats to confirm that encryption is enabled, adding more assurance.
DM encryption will bring Twitter more into line with other messaging apps, which are all moving towards enhanced privacy, despite concerns from some law enforcement groups that this could also facilitate criminal activity.
With no way for anyone to access encrypted exchanges, even the apps themselves, that then means that criminals can also use messages as a way to connect, without fear of detection, which has been a key point of concern raised about Meta’s push to enable encryption across all of its messaging products. But despite opposition, Meta’s moving ahead with that plan anyway, and Twitter is also set to move into line with the same.
Twitter chief Elon Musk has long touted encryption as a key development, in order to provide more reassurance to users, which would also, eventually, be extended to encrypted video and voice calling between accounts as well.
That plan was stalled early on in Musk’s tenure, as the company also instituted a crackdown on child abuse material, with Twitter’s trust and safety lead Ella Irwin saying that DM encryption could impede its efforts to weed out this element.
But now, Twitter’s moving ahead – and with journalists regularly leaking internal exchanges and messages as part of the ongoing ‘Twitter Files’ expose, that could also help to let users know that they won’t be subjected to the same snooping that Musk has facilitated in this respect.
So, really, the main privacy protection that you could be gaining from this is from Twitter itself, and Musk’s ideological crusade to uncover the truth behind various conspiracies. Musk regularly engages with these type of concepts, and jumps ahead in unmasking what he sees as media manipulation – but in many cases Musk has also been incorrect, or has re-angled certain conversations in order to support a certain viewpoint, as opposed to revealing what’s really at play.
But with encryption, more users will be able to trust that their DMs are not being monitored, and that they’ll be able to interact with freedom, knowing that these are, in fact, private chats. Which could also play a key role in the next phase of expanded payments in the app, which is another part of Elon’s ‘everything app’ plan. Secure messaging would also facilitate more secure payments, a key element in establishing this as a habitual behavior.
Twitter says that DM encryption is coming very soon.
