Twitter’s blue-check lefties are sweating about their direct messages — now firmly in the possession of the company’s billionaire owner Elon Musk.
Twitter DMs are the private communications users have with one another — and the repository of potentially sensitive correspondence for millions of users.
It’s “no different than trusting Alex Jones with our DMs,” comedian Kathy Griffin told The Post. The funny lady — who has 2 million followers — has tussled with Musk since he took over the platform. She was briefly banned earlier this month on the platform for impersonating Musk, but reinstated on Nov 19.
Twitter’s direct messages have never been encrypted and have always been vulnerable to hacking and bad actors within the company, but experts say the mass layoffs at Twitter have left things particularly vulnerable.
“If you continue to use Twitter direct messages for personal or sensitive communications, understand that Elon Musk or, for that matter, any other Twitter insider with sufficient authority can read them. This is because such messages are not end-to-end encrypted, unlike a number of other easy-to-use applications,” said Bryan Cunningham of the UC Irvine Cybersecurity and Policy Institute.
Twitter direct messages can be deleted only if every party in the chat agrees to do so and even then, it’s unclear whether or for how long the data remains stored on its servers.
Musk has vowed to move swiftly to guarantee the security of private messages on the platform.
“We want to enable users to be able to communicate without being concerned about their privacy, [or] without being concerned about a data breach at Twitter causing all of their DMs to hit the web, or think that maybe someone at Twitter could be spying on their DMs,” Musk told employees this week, The Verge reported. “It should be the case that I can’t look at anyone’s DMs if somebody has put a gun to my head.”
Twitter security around direct messages has been a problem for the platform long before Musk took the helm. In 2018 Twitter admitted that a bug has caused an undisclosed number of Direct Messages to become accessible to third parties for over a year. In August another Twitter employee was convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia in a plot which allowed the perp to hand over sensitive user data to the Kingdom.
Ben Collins, a who offers a decidedly left-wing view of Musk and Twitter for NBC News, has also publicly fretted about the DM situation — though took a more carefree approach when questioned by The Post.
“The only extremely spicy thing you’d find in my DMs are my true feelings about Aaron Judge, which are not fit for the New York Post. Also my communal Hulu password is in there, and that would blow up a lot of people’s weekends,” he said.
