Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced changes to the platform’s direct messaging feature, including the introduction of encryption.
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Elon Musk said Twitter could roll out encrypted direct messages on Wednesday, as the chief executive outlined plans to boost the social media service’s messaging capabilities.
In a tweet late Tuesday, Musk said the latest version of the Twitter app includes changes to direct messages, or DMs (non-public messages that users send each other).
Users can now reply to any message in a DM thread, not just recent ones, and can react to messages with any emoji, the CEO said. Previously, users could only reply to recent messages in DM threads and could only react to specific emojis.
Musk also announced that the encrypted DM “should” be released on Wednesday.
Message encryption means that only the sender and receiver can see the message. In theory, Twitter and Musk can’t see or intercept direct messages between people.
“The crux of the matter is I can’t see your DM even with a gun in my head,” Musk tweeted.
facebook parent Yuan In January, it said it was expanding testing of default end-to-end encryption on its Messenger service. WhatsApp, another messaging app owned by Meta, has used end-to-end encryption for years.
Encrypted messaging services have grown in popularity over the past few years as users have become more privacy-conscious.
Musk also said that voice and video calling will soon be added to Twitter, so users can “talk to people anywhere in the world” without giving out a phone number.
The development of direct messages didn’t get much attention from the previous CEO since Twitter’s founding. But Musk has repeatedly said he intends to make Twitter an “app for everything” from messaging to financial services.
New Twitter features don’t always roll out on time as Musk promises. In February, he said Twitter would introduce a feature that would share ad revenue with creators on the platform. That hasn’t happened yet.