Twitter’s new proprietor, Elon Musk, has been public about his need to enhance how the social community’s direct messages work. In a gathering with staff at this time, he spelled out precisely what that appears like.

Framed by presentation slides titled “Twitter 2.0” at Twitter’s San Fransisco headquarters on Monday, Musk informed staff that the corporate would encrypt DMs and work so as to add encrypted video and voice calling between accounts, based on a recording of the assembly obtained by The Verge.

“We need to allow customers to have the ability to talk with out caring about their privateness, [or] with out caring a couple of knowledge breach at Twitter inflicting all of their DMs to hit the online, or suppose that perhaps somebody at Twitter might be spying on their DMs,” Musk mentioned. “That’s clearly not going to be cool and it has occurred just a few instances earlier than.”

Musk is true about DMs being uncovered earlier than. In 2018, Twitter warned that an undisclosed variety of DMs between companies and their clients had been accessible by outsiders for over a yr. And earlier this yr, the US authorities charged an ex-employee with improperly accessing person knowledge on behalf of Saudi Arabia, although it’s unclear how DMs had been or weren’t used.

Through the years, Twitter has kickstarted after which paused constructing encrypted DMs a number of instances. However now Musk is about on rolling out encryption as a high precedence for the imaginative and prescient he’s calling Twitter 2.0. “It must be the case that I can’t have a look at anybody’s DMs if any individual has put a gun to my head,” he informed staff Monday.

“Sarcastically, Moxie Marlinspike labored at Twitter and truly wished to do encrypted DMs a number of years in the past, [but] was denied that after which went and created Sign,” Musk mentioned. (For these curious, The Wall Road Journal has a writeup from 2015 detailing Marlinspike’s time at Twitter.)

Musk went on to say that “we additionally need to have the flexibility to do voice and video chat by way of DMs.” He acknowledged that Sign requires the sharing of a telephone quantity to start out a thread and that, because of its account system, Twitter can facilitate safe calling “so that you just don’t have to provide somebody your telephone quantity.” Sign has mentioned since 2020 that it is also working to maneuver away from counting on telephone numbers, although it has but to roll out that means.

I might ask Twitter for touch upon what Musk mentioned about encrypting DMs however the firm doesn’t have a communications division anymore.