Since Elon Musk took over Twitter (and subsequently changed the name to X), his moves have been split between flashy display changes and hidden utility improvements. More often than not, they come packaged together.
How to Send Encrypted DMs on X
If you’ve identified an X Premium user you’d like to have an encrypted conversation with, here are the steps you need to follow:
you may also start an encrypted conversation from an existing chat. To do so, select theenvelope iconfrom either the column menu on the left side of the desktop view, or from the toolbar on the bottom of the mobile app.
Once you start an encrypted conversation, X saves it as a separate conversation in yourMessagesmenu. The encrypted conversation has a small gray padlock icon over the bottom-left of the recipient’s profile picture, but other than that, it looks and feels like a normal message.
Why Send Encrypted DMs on X?
So, now the question, why use encrypted X DMs? It doesn’t make much sense if you still think about X as “just” a social media platform. However, Musk is increasingly trying to re-imagine it as an all-purpose utility app, which also means making it more practical.
A lot of X users who use the platform professionally, particularly journalists, already encourage others to interact with them through encrypted messaging. Right now, that mainly means leaving the address to an encrypted mailing service in their bios.
While X has punished users for promoting other social media sites on the platform before, the company likely determined that a better way to keep users on-site would be to give them the tools that they leave the site to use. Unfortunately, the provided tool suffers from an inclusivity problem.
Another Pay-to-Play Security Feature
If you’re one of the (relatively few) X users who regularly go off-site to access encrypted messaging, X Premium’s encrypted DM’s might be exactly what you needed. For most users, it’s another pay-to-use feature that they’d hardly use even if they did pay for it.
