X's (formerly Twitter) new video calling and phone feature may be one of the biggest social media privacy and security mistakes I've seen in a long time.
Last week, X enabled audio and video calling on the platform for everyone. Not just those who pay for X Premium ($8/month), but also average, everyday, unverified X users.
Sounds wonderful, right? A free way to call anyone on X. Except it's not.
Audio and video calling is now available to everyone on X! Who do you call first? pic.twitter.com/DYvB7ZRrbYFebruary 28, 2024
Without asking, X enabled audio and video calling for its approximately 550 million users. The default is “People you follow” and at least seems to require them to follow you too.
The big problem, however, is that with almost 20 years on the platform, many of us follow and have been followed by many people who we don't really know very well or who don't even want to know more. Do we ever accept a direct message or send them one? Sure. But that was eons ago and maybe we just forgot to unfollow them.
Now imagine this. Any of those followers (who you follow) can enter an existing Direct Messages thread, select the little phone icon that appears next to their X contact's profile photo, and immediately start a call (audio or video). There's no message asking you if this is a good idea or reminding you to text them first. You select the call mode and X launches the call. Surprise!
The truth is that most of us prefer text messages to calls. Audio and video calls are reserved for our closest friends and family (and video conferencing required in the office).
And while I've created some close ties with my Twitter friends (X), almost none of them have my phone number and I don't have theirs. Most of them would be surprised to receive a voice call or video call from me.
I understand what Elon Musk is trying to do here: make X a do-it-all platform, something akin to China's WeChat. It might be a worthwhile ambition if it weren't for Elon Musk.
No one I know asked for Twitter…er…X…to add this feature, and certainly no one expects such a thing to be turned on by default.
X's audio and video calling capability is a privacy and security disaster in the making and X and Elon Musk should disable it by default immediately.
In the meantime, if you're still on X, you can open the DM panel in the mobile app and turn off the feature. At the very least, you might want to turn on “Enhanced Call Privacy” to hide your IP address from contacts during calls (I can't believe Musk left that option on by default, too). 🤦♂️
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