‘Instagram DMs were never encrypted’, says Adam Mosseri after Meta drops end-to-end encryption

Instagram community is also reeling from growing privacy concerns as Meta announced to disable Instagram's end-to-end encryption effective from May, 8.

The decision to scrap end-to-end encryption (E2EE) highlights Meta’s reversal of seven-year commitment to encrypted messaging.

In online messaging, E2EE is considered the most secure form of encryption, allowing only senders and users to view messages. However, in the past the privacy mode also proved to be a bone of contention, allowing rogue elements to spread extreme content online with impunity.

Another shocking claim regarding the encryption of Instagram DMs comes from Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram.

When asked by a user on his Instagram story, “Is end-to-end encryption for DMs going away?” Mosseri revealed a shocking claim, “I want to clarify that Instagram DMs were never encrypted.”

“There is a feature called secret DMs which allows you to encrypt DMs but in a very very small amount.”

Now with the removal of encryption, “less than 1 percent of overall DMs and now those DMs cannot be encrypted either,” he added.

In the “ask me anything section”, Mosseri also answered the question related to trial reels becoming available.

He said, “I had not realized that trial reels were not available on desktop. So I will talk to the team about it.”

The American businessman also clarified confusion regarding losing followers overnight. According to Mosseri, Instagram usually removes those accounts which are inactive for a very long time or bots. He also explained that in future, the company is planning to do this on regular basis.

Talking about the other social media platforms, TikTok announced in March it had no plans for E2EE direct messages.

After two weeks of the announcement, Instagram officially abandoned its rollout. Major platforms including Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, and Google Messages maintain E2EE as default.