Twitter May Be Reviving End-To-End Encryption For DMs

While most of the content on Twitter is in the public domain, the social media service does offer users some semblance of privacy with features like Protected Tweets and Direct Messages (DMs). While Twitter DMs have largely remained unchanged since its inception, Twitter has made some occasional updates in the past few years — including the ability to send longer DMs, and enhanced media sharing capabilities. However, one feature that is missing from Twitter DMs to this day is end-to-end encryption — a feature that ensures that a third party cannot intercept conversations between users.

Interestingly, Twitter originally planned to bring end-to-end encryption to DMs as early as 2014. This was at the height of PRISM controversy — a program run by the National Security Agency that makes it easy for the government to access data from internet companies with a simple court order. An explosive news report from 2013 revealed that several tech companies — including the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Apple — were participants in the PRISM program. A notable exception to this was Twitter, which expressed vehement opposition to PRISM. In fact, Twitter's decision to incorporate end-to-end encryption within its DM service was seen as a brave move from the company to protect user privacy.

However, within months of starting work on end-to-end encrypted DMS, Twitter abruptly stopped working on the feature in 2014. Twitter, however, never publicly acknowledged that it was considering enabling the feature. In November 2022, nearly a decade since Twitter shelved its plans to enable end-to-end DM encryption, the company reportedly began working on the feature again.

According to Hong Kong-based security researcher Jane Manchun Wong, Twitter has silently begun working on enabling end-to-end encryption for DMs. In a recent tweet, Wong posted screenshots of code references within Twitter's Android app indicating that end-to-end encrypted DMs are on the way. Elon Musk replied to Wong's tweet with a winking smiley — which some people have interpreted as Musk's confirmation that this feature is indeed on its way. What makes Jane's tweet important is that she happens to be a well-known analyst with a long history of accurately identifying unreleased app features.

Early prototype of Twitter’s upcoming end-to-end encrypted DMs “Encryption keys” screen: https://t.co/rcnd7h68lO pic.twitter.com/EMXSlI188j

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) November 16, 2022

More interestingly, we may actually need to thank Jane for this feature. This is because it was Jane herself who asked Musk to revive the end-to-end encryption feature. She made this public request a little less than a week ago, and it seems Musk did take note of her suggestion.

It remains to be seen how long Twitter takes to roll out end-to-end encryption to Twitter DMs. If this does happen in the near future, Twitter's DM service will be right up there with the likes of WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram — all of which have supported end-to-end encryption on their messaging apps for a while now.