Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has made a number of contentious moves, including the establishment of a new Blue membership service that enables everyone to become verified after paying a monthly price of $7.99. The business has put a stop to its new authentication system until November 29, but is still hard at work developing a new security feature for communications on the site.
Twitter is now working on end-to-end encryption for Direct Messages (DMs) to establish a secure environment in the Twitter inbox, as discovered by renowned reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong. This would imply that nobody, not even Twitter, could snoop on and read the communications you send and receive.
Wong discovered evidence that the functionality was being developed for Twitter for Android, but it will undoubtedly be available to other platforms as well. The prototype of the end-to-end encrypted DMs “Encryption keys” screen was also supplied by the reverse engineer. End-to-end encryption is ensured, according to the description on the screen, if your encryption keys coincide with the recipient’s phone number.
Twitter has previously begun developing end-to-end encryption for direct messages. It was discovered that the company was working on it back in 2018, but for some reason it never materialized. Elon Musk’s wink emoji in response to Wong’s tweet demonstrates that the business is this time actually thinking about adding more secure messaging to Twitter DMs.
At this time, it is unclear if it will be a premium feature, and Wong made no mention of any launch details in his tweet. But if end-to-end encryption is added to the Twitter Blue package, many users might think about paying for a subscription just for that reason. Hopefully, this will become clearer in the future.