As the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk already has several visions to transform the social media company. One of them is making direct messages (DM) more secure.
In a tweet, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla called for Twitter DMs to be protected by end-to-end encryption to make them more secure, such as messages sent via the Signal messaging app. With end-to-end encryption, messages sent can only be seen by the sender and recipient, and cannot be snooped on by others including the platform.
"Twitter DMs should have end-to-end encryption like Signal, so no one can spy on or hack your messages," Musk said in a tweet.
Musk's remarks come days after Twitter announced it had accepted an offer from Musk to buy the company and take it private for $44 billion.
Musk's proposal was met with mixed reactions by Twitter users. There are those who support Musk's idea, but there are also those who criticize the richest man in the world for buying Twitter.
Reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, who frequently leaks Twitter's latest features, also responded to Musk's tweet. Wong said Twitter developed end-to-end encryption for DMs in 2018 but the project was scrapped.
The absence of end-to-end encryption in Twitter DMs has been in the spotlight for a long time. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) even said that without end-to-end encryption users' privacy and security could be threatened.
"Because they are not end-to-end encrypted, Twitter itself has access to the messages," the EFF said.
"That means Twitter can turn it over in response to law enforcement requests, messages can be leaked, and internal access can be abused by malicious hackers and Twitter employees themselves (as has happened in the past."
Because it doesn't yet have end-to-end encryption support, Twitter lags behind when compared to Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger. Messages sent via Instagram and Messenger are protected by end-to-end encryption, but that feature is off by default.
In addition to end-to-end encryption for Twitter DMs, Musk has also revealed something else he wants to change on Twitter. This South African-born man said he wanted to eradicate spam accounts and bots, bring an edit button, promote free speech, open the Twitter algorithm, and simplify the account verification process.