Elon Musk touts Twitter 2.0, wants to transform the company’s direct messaging platform

In an internal presentation which he titled Twitter 2.0, Elon Musk reportedly told his employees at the San Francisco headquarters on Monday that the company would encrypt DMs and work to add encrypted video and voice calling between accounts.

According to The Verge, which was privileged to access a record of the meeting, Musk wants users to be able to communicate without being concerned about their privacy.

He explained that a breach of data where people’s DMs flooded the web happened in the past, and wants to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

To do this, the CEO spoke with Moxie Marlinspike of Signal and former Twitter employee, who is now “potentially willing to help out” with encrypting Twitter DMs.

Moxie Marlinspike had wanted to do encrypted DMs years back while he worked for the social media giant. In a Wall Street Journal, he was reported to have spent most of his time improving product security.

The former Twitter employee also tinkered with a few privacy projects, including one that could have encrypted the company’s direct messages so that they were unreadable to law enforcement. He resigned 14 months later to start Signal, an encrypted chat app that he runs as a non-profit.

Musk had Signal in mind all this while and was following up on the Marlinspike’s competency to deliver on his promise.

“Signal is designed very differently. All communication is e2ee, so there is no cloud DB with everyone’s entire plaintext msg history in it. Groups are encrypted by default, so the only ppl who know group details are the people in them. Same w/ contacts, calls, social graph, etc,” Marlinspike said in a response to Musk’s tweet earlier this year.

Elon Musk has indicated that he will delay the launching of Twitter Blue Verified until there is a strong degree of confidence that impersonation can be stopped.

The new CEO gave his staff an ultimatum on Wednesday last week, demanding that they either sign a contract to work harder for a new “hardcore” Twitter or quit their jobs with the promise of receiving three months’ worth of severance pay; to which many opted to take severance rather commit.