Note: this is a “living” document. Check back for updates.
Last updated: 30 April 2023 around 1220h London time.
Hi! Thank you for reading this!
If you’re a journalist and you’re going to write something about Twitter adopting Encryption for Twitter Direct Messages, it’s really easy to adopt the frame that:
“Elon is doing it, so it must be bad.”
or
“Some people are saying that Encryption enables Child Abuse!
Therefore Elon is enabling Child Abuse!”
…but the reality is a lot more complex than that. There are great questions you can ask, and there are assurances which you can demand from Elon and Twitter.
Why are these frames suboptimal?
Twitter is a huge platform, used by millions of people, and it primarily enables two forms of communication:
- Nearly-Broadcast (Tweets)
- One-to-One and One-to-Several (Direct Messages)
…plus some other niche/experimental mechanisms like audio chats.
The encryption announcement impacts the Direct Messages feature, and it’s all about giving more privacy to all the people who use Direct Messages.
Yes, but isn’t Privacy a bad thing?
What really? Is privacy a bad thing? Certainly there exists a minority of bad people — even in the USA less than 1% of the population is in prison, so arguably there are 99% “good” people out there — and “privacy” is an enabler for everyone, including the bad people.
But that doesn’t mean that we need to avoid privacy, in much the same way that we don’t need to avoid creating public infrastructure like “roads” just because they might be used by a getaway vehicle in a bank heist.
A different perspective is that we need more privacy, everywhere, and in theory (note: foreshadowing) Elon will be providing this.
But why does Encryption need adding to Twitter DMs? Couldn’t “they” (people who need privacy) just use Signal?
Consider: if you are fortunate enough to live in a part of the world where the entire household water supply is “drinkable” quality, how nice your life is as a result.
Having a 100% drinkable water supply means that it doesn’t matter which tap you use to wash food, that if your kid gets a cut you probably don’t need to boil and cool water just to wash it out as part of the treatment, if they drink from a hosepipe it’s not a huge deal, and you can largely forget about the stress and self-discipline necessary to save your family from getting sick. Of course it’s a tremendous waste of resources to use drinkable water to flush a toilet, but overall it’s an enabler of so much public health.
Ditto, for end-to-end privacy.
It’s utterly normal for a conversation which started trivially to become much more sensitive, for instance a discussion with your parents which suddenly includes them sending credit-card information to you.
Do you want that data to be at risk of theft by hackers? No.
Do you want to scold your parents for not stopping that Twitter DM conversation to use Signal to send you the sensitive stuff? No.
Do you want to live your life with the stress and self-discipline necessary to stop hackers from walking off with your sensitive messag
