Criticized by many, and praised by others, it is clear that Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is not going unnoticed. And it is that beyond his outlandish messages, Musk is taking advantage of the growing popularity of his messages to probe the general public of the social network with some possible functions that could be added to the platform.
Thus, in addition to the already ongoing function of editing tweets, and adding to other maneuvers to deal with the accusations of some users, such as the proposal to release Twitter’s algorithms to an open source model, one of the last messages of the billionaire suggests that an end-to-end encryption system should be implemented (also known as E2EE) to protect the privacy of direct messages within the platform.
Twitter DMs should have end to end encryption like Signal, so no one can spy on or hack your messages
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2022
And it is that currently, any direct message sent between Twitter users can be seen by the sender and the recipient, plus any twitter admin with the required level of system access.
In this way, the new encryption system would make the messages remain exclusively linked to the two parties involved within this conversation, leaving the social network itself completely out of access to any private content. Ciphertext can only be decrypted when the sender and receiver have the correct cryptographic keys to decrypt the original message. This encryption is intended maintain the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data.
While online privacy advocates welcome E2EE and the protections it provides, we will of course continue to encounter some detractors. And it is that other parties involved such as governments or other organizations feel that E2EE goes too far, pointing out that it can help to hide criminal activities and protect those who participate in them.
