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Even if Twitter is small compared to WhatsApp, having another major household-name service add "e2ee by default for DMs" is good for the world because it brings
by holmesworcester 4y ago
Even if Twitter is small compared to WhatsApp, having another major household-name service add "e2ee by default for DMs" is good for the world because it brings "e2ee by default for DMs" closer to being a standard practice, the way SSL has become a standard practice.
At first, only a handful of sites implemented SSL for all their pages, but eventually a critical mass of sites did it, and at that point every major site had to do it.
To make e2ee as ubiquitous for messaging as SSL is for browsing, we'll need a similar dynamic where it becomes standard practice, and each major site that adds it is a big victory.
Also, Twitter might have a smaller userbase, but journalists and political figures are among its most active users, so the social impact (e.g. to the health of democratic governments) of protecting the privacy of Twitter users might be on the same order as that of protecting the privacy of WhatsApp users.
- hadlock 4y agoNot only is twitter small compared to WhatsApp, it's tiny, and has had static (no) user growth for seven years (previously reported 300 million active monthly users, recently announced it had been over reporting...). The tech and journalism communities exist in a bit of an echo chamber. Twitter might be a "household name" but it's importance for mass communication is a bit overblown.
- holmesworcester 4y agoEven if that's true, it's still valuable and praiseworthy for Twitter to take this step. If some small open source communication tool that was important to Hacker News readers added end-to-end encryption we'd all be cheering, no? So why isn't it a big deal (in some sense at least) for Twitter to do it?
- hadlock 4y agoBased on the number of people replying "don't post twitter threads, they're user hostile 1/22" I am not sure twitter is celebrated here by the majority.