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John,
The last few months of chaos at Twitter has reminded us of a disturbing reality: the largest social media platforms in the world are bought, sold and controlled by uber-wealthy individuals that can decide to exert their power over the company’s practices and policies whenever they want.
At Elon’s Twitter, that has meant laying off top executives and engineers, dissolving the company’s board of directors, using the site to spread a homophobic lie about the attack on Paul Pelosi, and unilaterally limiting employees’ access to content moderation tools.1,2,3,4 Not to mention the continuous banning of accounts.5
Donate Now for Safer DMs
The picture at Twitter is bleak, and here’s what’s even more frightening: it could be way, way worse. Any of the platforms you use to communicate with friends, family, partners, coworkers, customers, and others could be bought by a Musk-type that wants to go after people they don’t like, whether it’s by publishing embarrassing private messages, organizing armies of online trolls, blocking access to accounts, or kicking users off the platform entirely.
Through our Make DMs Safe campaign, we’re fighting for a straightforward, no-brainer privacy feature for users on these platforms: default end-to-end encrypted messaging. Implementing this feature will mean that no matter who takes over a company, people’s private messages are safe.
No one should have access to your DMs except you and the people you’re messaging. That’s why in 2023 we’re organizing creative actions outside company offices, launching mass education efforts, and building a vast coalition of organizations and companies that represent the many constituencies that would benefit from default end-to-end encryption. Some companies are already moving in the right direction on this—including Twitter—but it’s clear nothing will change without concerted pressure.6,7
It’s hard to say what’s going to happen to Twitter, but we know this for certain: the fight of end-to-end encryption has never been more important, and we can’t win without your support. A donation of any size is one of the most valuable contributions you can make to support basic safety online, right now.
Help us win better protections for millions of users online. Please give today.
In solidarity,
Leila and the Team at Fight
Footnotes
1. CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/15/musk-fires-twitter-engineers-after-critical-posts-on-twitter-and-slack.html
2. Fortune: https://fortune.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-fires-twitter-board-verification-layoffs/
3. The LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-30/elon-musk-spreads-unfounded-conspiracy-theory-on-paul-pelosi-attack-on-twitter
4. Washington Post:https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/elon-musk-twitter-content-moderations/
5. CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/15/media/twitter-musk-journalists-hnk-intl/index.html
6. TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/11/meta-starts-testing-end-to-end-encryption-for-individual-messenger-chats/
7. The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/21/23472174/twitter-dms-encrypted-elon-musk-voice-video-calling
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