By
Temitope Olatunji
May 6th, 2024
Video and audio calls will allow users to talk to anyone on the app without providing their personal phone numbers.
Twitter is planning to launch the encryption of direct messages on Wednesday, according to Elon Musk. In an attempt to enhance communication features on social media, the Chief Executive Officer is coming up with newer ways to gather attention. Musk, in a recent tweet late on Tuesday, said that the most recent version of the Twitter application will contain updates to direct messages or DMs- that comprise non-public messages people send to each other.
The CEO also said that the users will now be able to respond to any messages in a DM thread, and not just the most recent ones. Also, reactions can be given using any emoji, which was not a feature earlier. Musk also added that the encrypted DMs should be released on Wednesday.
Encryption in messages on Twitter allows the sender and receiver to be the only entities to view a message. In theory, Twitter and the top officials will then not be able to see or intercept direct messages between people.
Moreover, Twitter is coming up with several other new features like audio and video calls. This will allow users to talk to anyone on the app without providing their personal phone number. Musk was quick to blast Meta messenger services by saying that these cannot be trusted. The messaging feature, however, will be challenged by several other messaging apps like Telegram and Signal which also give priority to privacy in chats.
Ever since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, the business tycoon has taken rather impulsive decisions to revamp and change some significant features of the application. Musk also plans to design an all-purpose application called “X” that has several functionalities like messaging, payments, etc. Recently, he enlisted the tech company as a part of the “X” shell corporation, which changes Twitter’s name but still uses it for commercial purposes.
In a recent statement in January, Facebook parent Meta talked about expanding the testing for default end-to-end encryption for its Messenger service. Whatsapp, which is also a popular messaging app owned by Meta, has had end-to-end encryption for quite some time now.
Encryption in messaging has become a very important aspect of applications as more priority is given to people’s privacy.
Since the beginning of Twitter’s journey, the development of the direct messages feature didn’t get enough attention from the people who headed the company. However, Musk has indicated several times that he has plans to make Twitter into an “everything app” that offers services from messaging to financial services.
However, the deadlines have always been difficult to meet for the team at Twitter. New Twitter features that Musk promises are almost always never introduced on time. In February, Musk claimed to launch a feature to share advertising revenue with creators on the platform. This hasn’t still been revealed yet.