Encrypted Direct Messages are now available on Twitter, but only between paying subscribers

X has added an encrypted direct messages feature to its platform, following the announcement made by CEO Elon Musk last week. The new feature aims to provide users with an extra layer of security and privacy for their private conversations.

The social media giant has created a new support page on the official Twitter Help website to provide additional information about the new feature. However, there are several limitations: the feature does not support group encryption or has a protection against man-in-the-middle attacks. But the most important one is that senders and recipients must be verified, which means the feature is limited to paying users of the service!

This restricts it significantly, and the other limitations reduce the use of the feature further. As stated by Matthew Green, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who focuses on cryptography: "This clearly is not better than Signal or WhatsApp or anything that uses the Signal Protocol, in terms of features, in terms of security". Signal's encryption protocol, considered the modern standard in end-to-end encrypted calling and texting, is not only used in the app with the same name but also in both Whatsapp's encrypted-by-default communications and Facebook Messenger's opt-in encryption feature known as Secret Conversations. All of these apps are free, compared to the $8 per month subscription for Twitter Blue to make your account verified.

Despite the limitations, encrypted DMs feature is still a step forward in the platform's efforts to improve user privacy. Twitter has been under scrutiny in recent years due to data breaches and privacy concerns. With the addition of this new feature, the company aims to provide users with a more secure and private messaging experience.