You see there’s a call from X when you pick up your phone.
Sorry, what?
Yes, the program formerly known as Twitter may now be used for video and phone conversations. Depending on your point of view, this means that you might receive calls from persons you haven’t given your phone number to.
Initially accessible only to premium subscribers, the feature is currently gradually being extended to all platform users and is turned on by default.
Anybody can make a video or voice call to your account using direct messages that have a phone symbol, but they can only be made through the app and not the desktop.
If you miss a call, you’ll get a notification stating who was calling and, well, that they called.
But if you’d rather not get them at all, they can be switched off.
How to switch off X calling
- Go to Settings
- Go to into Privacy and Security
- Tap on Direct messages
- Here you have a number of options. You can either choose just to receive calls from just people in your address book, people you follow, verified users or everyone
- Alternatively, you can switch off the function entirely by toggling off ‘Enable audio and video calling’
So far, the reception for X calling has been lukewarm, to say the least.
‘Cool! Disabled it already! Thanks for the warning!’ one X user, James, said.
audio and video calling are now available to everyone on X! who are you calling first? pic.twitter.com/DYvB7ZRrbY
— News (@XNews) February 28, 2024
Another, Peter, said: ‘Buckle up, bot calls incoming!!!’
A third, Sarah Go Green said: ‘X has just added a feature to enable audio and video calling.
‘I have just turned mine off as I don’t really want anyone randomly calling my phone or video calling even if I know them on X. I’ve read when the calls name it also discloses your IP address.’
Sarah Go Green is right.
The calls are peer-to-peer, meaning the two people in the call share each other’s IP addresses as the call connects to their devices directly.
X’s official help centre says that calls are routed in a way where the user’s IP addresses ‘may be visible to the other’.
To hide your IP address, you can toggle on ‘Enhanced call privacy’ in your message settings. This means your calls ‘will be relayed through X infrastructure, and the IP address of any party that has this setting enabled will be masked’.
The official help centre does not mention encryption, meaning the calls may not be end-to-end encrypted.
