Tesla CEO and new Twitter CEO Elon Musk revealed during an interview with Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that United States government agencies previously had access to private messages sent and received on the social media platform.
“The degree to which various government agencies had effectively full access to everything that was going on at Twitter blew my mind,” Musk explained. “I was not aware of that.”
“Would that include people’s DMs [Direct Messages]?” Carlson asked.
“Uh, yes,” Musk replied. “Yes, because the DMs are not encrypted.”
Carlson noted that “a lot of well-known people — reporters talking to their sources, government officials talking to each other, the rich people in the world — they are DMing each other. And the assumption obviously was incorrect about that that was private, but that was being read by various governments.”
To which Musk confirmed Carlson’s statement, and the FNC host lamented, “Scary.”
The Twitter owner then revealed his plans to introduce a feature on the platform that will allow users to encrypt their messages to the point that not even he cold access them if someone “holds a gun to my head.”
LifeSite News reports:
Earlier in the interview Carlson pointed out that the revelations since Musk acquired Twitter have shown it was a “magnet for the intel agencies from around the world.”
“One of the things we learned after you started opening the books is that they were exerting influence from within Twitter,” Carlson said.
“I mean, it was absurd,” Musk replied, confirming Carlson’s statement.
Moreover, the Fox News anchor asked Musk if governments had complained about the actions he has taken since he bought Twitter.
“I haven’t had direct complaints to me. I have had sort of like some indirect complaints. I think people are a little concerned about complaining to me directly in case I tweet about it,” the business mogul said, laughing.
“If I got something that was unconstitutional from the U.S. government … my reply would be to send them a copy of the First Amendment and just say like ‘what part of this are we getting wrong?’”
Musk also explained why his company only runs with 20% of the staff that Twitter used to run with, “It turns out you don’t need all that many people to run Twitter.”
“But 80%? That’s a lot,” Carlson remarked.
“I mean, if you’re not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization and … you don’t care that much about censorship, you can really let go of a lot of people it turns out,” Musk replied, to which the duo ended up in stitches.
