Elon Musk Confirms Twitter 2.0 will Bring End-to-End Encryption to Direct Messages

Twitter chief executive Elon Musk confirmed plans for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for direct messages on the platform.

The feature is part of Musk’s vision for Twitter 2.0, which is expected to be what’s called 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 for encrypted messages first came to light in mid-November 2022, when mobile researcher Jane Manchun Wong spotted source code changes in Twitter’s Android app referencing conversation keys for E2EE chats.

It’s worth noting that various other messaging platforms, such as Signal, Threema, WhatsApp, iMessage, Wire, Tox, and Keybase, already support encryption for messages.

Google, which previously turned on E2EE for one-to-one chats in its RCS-based Messages app for Android, is currently piloting the same option for group chats. Facebook, likewise, began enabling E2EE on Messenger for select users by default this past August.

Musk further touted that new user signups to the social media platform are at an “all-time high,” averaging over two million per day in the last seven days as of November 16, up 66% compared to the same week in 2021. Twitter has over 253.8 million monetizable daily active users (mDAU).

The slides also reveal that reported impersonations on the service spiked earlier this month, before and in the wake of the launch of its revamped Twitter Blue subscription.

The new subscription tier is tentatively set to be rolled out as early as December 2, 2022, with a multi-colored verification system that aims to give out gold badges for companies, gray for governments, and blue for individual accounts.

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