Elon Musk claims that Twitter will enable encrypted DMs and add voice and video calling to its users

Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has been public about his desire to improve how the social network’s direct messages work. He explained exactly how that works in a meeting today with employees.

Framed by presentation slides titled “Twitter 2.0” at Twitter’s San Fransisco headquarters on Monday, Musk told employees that the company would encrypt DMs and work to add encrypted video and voice calling between accounts, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Verge.

“We want to enable users to be able to communicate without being concerned about their privacy, [or] without being concerned about a data breach at Twitter causing all of their DMs to hit the web, or think that maybe someone at Twitter could be spying on their DMs,” Musk said. “That’s obviously not going to be cool and it has happened a few times before.”

Musk is correct about DMs being exposed previously. 2018 Twitter warnedAn unreported number of DMs between businesses were known to be available by outsiders for more than a full year. The DMs were also disclosed to outsiders earlier in the year. Ex-employee charged by US government with improperly accessing user data on behalf of Saudi Arabia, though it’s unclear how DMs were or weren’t used.

Twitter has been able to build encrypted DMs many times, starting and stopping several times. Musk now wants encryption to be a top priority in his vision of Twitter 2.0. “It should be the case that I can’t look at anyone’s DMs if somebody has put a gun to my head,” he told employees Monday.

“Ironically, Moxie Marlinspike worked at Twitter and actually wanted to do encrypted DMs several years ago, [but] was denied that and then went and created Signal,” Musk said. (For the curious: The Wall Street Journal This is a 2015 writeup detailing Marlinspike’s time at Twitter.)

Musk went on to say that “we also want to have the ability to do voice and video chat via DMs.” He acknowledged that Signal requires the sharing of a phone number to start a thread and that, thanks to its account system, Twitter can facilitate secure calling “so that you don’t have to give someone your phone number.” Signal Since 2020, has spokenIt also stated that it is working to get rid of the dependence on phone numbers, although it has not yet implemented that capability.

I would ask Twitter for comment on what Musk said about encrypting DMs but the company doesn’t have a communications department anymore.