Twitter introduces encrypted DMs for paying subscribers

Twitter is adding more and more features. Over the course of the last few months, the social media platform has observed several modifications ranging from the verification criteria to increased word length of tweets. Recently, Elon Musk has announced another interesting feature possibly to attract more users to the paid subscription.

Twitter announced that it now supports sending encrypted direct messages. It enables users to communicate without having to worry about the platform preserving their messages because they will only be accessible on the device. However, the feature is only available to paying members be they among the verified users or from an organization or their affiliates. The feature is available on one condition the sender and the receiver both must be paying subscribers. They should be paying at least $8/month for Twitter Blue to use the encrypted DMs feature. 

The encrypted messages will show as individual conversations. As of now, the feature is restricted to one-to-one messages. It is not currently available for group chats. Besides this, the feature has several other limitations as well. It is not prone to man-in-the-middle attacks. Twitter might compromise the chat due to the mandatory legal process, and neither the sender nor the recipient would be aware of it. Links and messages themselves will be encrypted, but metadata like the receiver, creation time, or linked content won’t be.

Well, we hope that this is not the final phase of encrypted DMs. Since users might not be interested to pay Twitter for a service that is freely accessible on other platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal, and iMessage.