Elon Musk reveals government had access to private Twitter messages

Twitter direct messages, the private conversations channel on the social network, was accessible to several international intelligence agencies in addition to those of the United States. This happened before Elon Musk's purchase of the company. The technology mogul revealed this information in the first part of his exclusive interview with Tucker Carlson for Fox Channel.

According to Musk, the company granted full access to private conversations between users to various government agencies. Musk claimed that this is one of the most crude and absurd discoveries he made after acquiring the company. "The degree to which government agencies had full access to everything that was happening on Twitter blew my mind. I wasn't aware of it," Musk assured Carlson. This included DMs (direct messages), according to Musk, as these are not encrypted.

Elon Musk added in his interview that Twitter is working on encrypting private messages and that this functionality would be ready in the coming months. Encrypting messages would give more privacy and security to communications that social network users want to keep private. Since the arrival of Twitter's new CEO, new connections between the federal government and the social network have been uncovered, connections which violate users' privacy and even censor the content that is published. It happened recently with the case of Hunter Biden's laptop, the contents of which were disclosed to the New York Post by a computer scientist.

Carlson and Musk also discussed the dangers of artificial intelligence. Recently, Musk co-signed a public brief with other leading figures in technology research calling for a halt to the development of ChatGPT-type artificial intelligences. In this first part of the interview, Musk repeated his warnings. "AI is more dangerous than, say, a bad airplane or car design. In the sense that it has the potential to destroy civilizations," Musk argued during the interview.

A second part of the interview with Elon Musk will be published next Thursday, with more details on these issues.