Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk has announced that Twitter direct messages(DMs) will have an end-to-end encryption like Signal, so as to prevent hackers and spys from having access to users messages
Tesla owner and Wold’s richest man, Elon Musk has finally takeover the ownership of social media giants,Twitter for $44bn yanstv.ng had reported on Monday.
Since the takeover deal of Twitter by Elon Musk was finalized, the world’s richest man has been seen saying much regarding new ideas that will be implemented.
One of the most applauded, and yet at the same time had to implement, is the introduction of end-to-end encrypted direct messages to what is popularly called Twitter 2.0.
Musk who made the announcement via his Twitter account on April 28 , tweeted stating that;
“Twitter DMs should have end-to-end encryption like Signal, so no one can spy on or hack your messages.”
The announcement seems to be a good development to a lot of Twitter users as yanstv.ng gathered that at the time of writing, Musk’s tweet has amassed 1.4 million likes and been retweeted more than 110,000 times.
yanstv.ng gathered that, an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) posting four days prior to Musk’s announcement was advocating for the encryption of DMs.
The foundation stated that;
“when you send a direct message on Twitter, there are three parties who can read that message: you, the user you sent it to, and Twitter itself.”
According to EFF, this means that Twitter can hand over the messages in response to requests from law enforcement.
EFF added that, the most disturbing of all is;
“they can be leaked, and internal access can be abused by malicious hackers and Twitter employees themselves.”
Meanwhile, their are much controversies and debates by users that encrypted messages are not a privacy panacea.
Prior to Musk’s takeover of Twitter, there is an allegation by Twitter users that he had made it known that as the owner he could read any direct messages past and present.
Twitter had previously stated that it has the ability to manually review DMs to investigate reported violations and misuse of our service, or to comply with laws or governmental requests. All of which is without taking into consideration those regimes which prohibit, or at least restrict, the use of such encrypted platforms.
Meanwhile, the decision is a tough one for musk to make, knowing if he is willing to sacrifice his vision of a free speech social network.
Recall that yanstv.ng reported that in his takeover speech, Musk noted that free speech is foundation of a functional democracy, which he said Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.
