Twitter upgrades DM replies 🐦

Twitter is making big changes to direct messages and expects to introduce encrypted DMs on Wednesday, according to tweets from the company and owner Elon Musk.

As detailed in a tweet from the company’s support account, you can now reply to specific messages (which work like the in-line replies you might be familiar with in iMessage) and react to messages with any reaction instead of a limited few. I just downloaded the iOS app to my phone and both features were there. You can access them by pressing and holding on a specific message.

Perhaps the bigger change is encrypted DMs, which Musk said was a priority for Twitter in a meeting with employees in November. Musk says the version 1.0 release of the feature “should happen” on Wednesday, and he promises that it will “grow in sophistication” at a rapid rate. “The acid test is that I could not see your DMs even if there was a gun to my head,” he said.

In addition, Musk said that sometime “soon,” Twitter will let you do “voice and video chat from your handle to anyone on this platform.” The idea, according to Musk, is that you’ll be able to use Twitter to “talk to people anywhere in the world without giving them your phone number.”