Twitter direct messages is always a responsibility of confidentiality. Direct messages you send to friends and strangers on the internet end-to-end encryptedmake your chats accessible if Twitter suffers a data breachor for company employees with proper permissions to access them. Both scenarios are more likely in Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where The main security and data protection officer has left.
Since Musk acquired Twitter and started lay off thousands of employees in early November, remodeling company in your vision, many waves of tweeters have abandoned the platform. In doing so, they often try to download their Twitter archive and delete the DM. In chaos, this process often goes wrong.
In Europe, however, people have turned to the continent. GDPR . Data Law, which gives people rights over how their information is collected, stored, and used. This includes the right to delete data. However, Twitter’s response to these requests, which WIRED has viewed, seems to suggest that the platform ignores detailed requests for DM removals and just directs people to general guidance that doesn’t explain whether Twitter delete your DM from their server or not. And now European data regulators are joining in.
“On Twitter, the delete button doesn’t work the way people think it does,” said Michael Veale, an associate professor focusing on digital rights and regulation in the Faculty of Law at University College London. “If you delete your direct messages in the app or on the website, it won’t delete them from Twitter’s servers,” Veale said.
For years, there wasn’t any clarity around what Twitter’s built-in tools for deleting your messages actually do. In the social media site, there are theoretically two ways to delete a DM you sent. In your inbox you can delete entire conversations, while in messages you can delete individual posts.
None of these options actually appear to delete your messages. Twitter says that if you delete entire chats, they’ll be removed from your inbox but still available to the person you’re messaging. Meanwhile, if you delete an individual message, Twitter says the people you sent the message to “will still be able to see it.” by Twitter the help center shows messages and conversations “only removed from your account.” They do not say that the messages have been deleted from the system or its servers.
Previous research has found that deleted DMs are held in Twitter’s servers for many years. In 2022, Twitter whistleblower and former security chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko declare it impossible in some cases for Twitter to delete data.
At the beginning of November, Veale created a guide that people in Europe can be used to request Twitter to remove DMs from its servers. In the guide, Veale said the “disaster scenario” is a data breach similar to Ashley Madison hack 2015, where people’s private lives are spread on the internet. Journalists, activists, protesters, etc. have all relied on Twitter’s messaging over the past decade to share personal information and communicate with people who may be at risk.
