Twitter has introduced additional security technology to make it more difficult for outside parties to spy on its users.

The social media firm said it had recently implemented technology known as forward secrecy, which prevents attackers from exploiting a potential weakness in HTTPS that allows large quantities of data to be decrypted if spies are able to steal a private master key.

In a post on its engineering blog, Twitter said it believed it should be be the “new normal” for web service owners.

“A year and a half ago, Twitter was first served completely over HTTPS,” it said. “Since then, it has become clearer and clearer how important that step was to protecting our users’ privacy.”

Under the new system, new keys are created for individual sessions, making it impossible to use a master key to decrypt them.

“Security is an ever-changing world. Our work on deploying forward secrecy is just the latest way in which Twitter is trying to defend and protect the user’s voice in that world,” Twitter said.

The move comes after reports about spying and intelligence gathering by government agencies such as the NSA.

Twitter encouraged other sites to follow its lead in implementing the technology, both HTTPS and foreward secrecy, and said website users should demand sites use HTTPS technology to protect their privacy.

“The security gains have never been more important to implement,” the company said.

(Additional reporting: Reuters)