Twitter CEO Elon Musk has confirmed plans to implement end-to-end encryption ( E2EE) in direct messages.
The feature forms part of Musk’s vision of Twitter 2.0. It is expected to become an “everything app”. Other functionalities include longform tweets and payments, according to a slide deck shared by Musk over the weekend.
The company’s plans to send encrypted messages were first discovered by Jane Manchun Wong , a mobile researcher who discovered source code modifications in Twitter’s Android application. These changes were referencing conversation keys that could be used for E2EE chats.
Notably, many other messaging platforms such as Signal, Threema and WhatsApp already support encryption of messages.
Google has already enabled E2EE for one to-one chats within its RCS-based Messenger app for Android. The company is currently testing the same option for group conversations. Facebook also enabled E2EE Messenger for selected users in August.
Musk also stated that the number of new users signing up for the social media platform is at an “all time high,” with over 2 million people per day on average in the past seven days, up 66% from the same week 2021. Twitter boasts more than 253.8 million active daily monetizable users (mDAU).
These slides also show that reports of impersonations on this service spiked earlier in the month, before, and after the launch of its revamped TwitterBlue subscription.
The new subscription level will be available as soon as December 2, 2022. It features a multi-colored verification system, which aims to award gold badges to companies, gray to governments, and blue to individual accounts.
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