It's been revealed, by a security researcher named Karan Saini, that Twitter does not really delete the Direct Messages that you have deleted. The social media platform is reported to be keeping DMs deleted by users for many years after users have deleted them, on their servers.

Saini discovered this after requesting and downloading the archived data for his account and finding that there had been deleted DMs dating several years back.

"DMs are never 'deleted' – rather only witheld from appearing in the UI. The archive geature lets you view these DMs, as well as any others with now suspended, or deactivated users," wrote Saini.

Generally Twitter users treat DMs as a private form of communication and trust that when they click "Delete", the DM is deleted for good. However, this is clearly not the case, even worse is that Twitter still holds onto deleted DMs of deactivated accounts for many years, contradicting its own policy.

This is not the first time Twitter is embroiled in a DMs privacy scandal. At the beginning of 2018 a Senior Network Security Engineer at Twitter was caught on camera revealing that "We can actually read your DMs." This, combined with the latest revelation by Saini, raises concerns about Twitter's privacy practices and whether or not, going forward, they can be trusted.