All private messaging should be end-to-end encrypted. There's really no excuse at this point for it not to be. It can be seamless.

And the importance of this goes beyond whether or not you trust Twitter and the government with your messages. Even if you trust Twitter as a corporation, and trust every single person they employ, and your government, you should still want end-to-end encryption.

Why? Because no website is unhackable.

Twitter themselves were recently hacked in a big way: fake tweets promoting a crypto scam came from major accounts like Obama, Elon Musk, etc. The details of this hack haven't been released, but it is speculated to be a social engineering attack that gave them access to do this on all of these huge accounts. There is no reason why this hack, or a hack similar to it, couldn't also give them access to everyone's private messages, which they could then store offline.

Why would a hacker want to do this? Why would a hacker care about your DMs when you're a nobody? If I were nefarious and found myself with a database of every single person's private messages, I would write an algorithm that searches this database for private shit. It could be as basic as looking for keywords like "sex" or more advanced like searching images for predominantly flesh tones. This software could then automatically send its findings to the user with a blackmail demand. If it doesn't receive the demand within a timeframe, it could automatically send these findings to all of their followers.

Sure, depending on how basic or advanced the algorithm is, there may be a lot of false positives. But would you want to risk your private messages to anyone being exposed to everyone?

Or, if they don't want to monetize it, they could just publish the database in its entirety. Once it's on the open internet, it's never going away. Perhaps a terrorist does this with all american accounts to hurt the country? How damaging would it be for everyone's private messages to be in a searchable database? Perhaps they could blackmail an entire country with the threat of releasing the database?

And, the worst part is, if you've ever sent something you wish to keep private on one of these services, you are forever at risk of this happening, because there is essentially no way to guarantee it gets deleted from their server. Even if you delete the message on your end, and convince the recipient to delete it on their end, it very likely stays on the server forever.

Speaking to that last bit, there should be legislation regarding the handling of private data stored on servers, including private messages.