Twitter has announced that it is working on an edit button for tweets, following Tesla CEO (and Twitter’s biggest shareholder) Elon Musk’s poll asking users if they would want such a feature. However, the social media platform noted that it wasn’t influenced by the poll, adding that it had been “working on an edit feature since last year.”
The microblogging platform said that it will be testing the edit option by rolling it out to select members of the Twitter Blue subscription service. This function will allow users to fix typos or errors in a tweet without losing any replies, retweets, or likes it has already received. However, the company has not specified how the feature will work.
now that everyone is asking…
yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year!
no, we didn’t get the idea from a poll 😉
we're kicking off testing within @TwitterBlue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible.
— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) April 5, 2022
The closest alternative for this option is the undo button, which allows you to recall a tweet right after sending it. It essentially works as a shortcut to delete a tweet, but it’s still exclusive to Twitter Blue.
The company earlier announced the edit feature on April 1, and most users laughed it off as an April Fool’s joke. It was never too keen to add the option until Parag Agrawal took on the role of CEO. Back in 2018, former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey said the firm would “probably never” include the feature, citing transparency issues.
On Monday, Elon Musk revealed that he owned a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, making him the company’s biggest shareholder. Shortly after, he polled users about wanting an edit button. The tweet accrued more than four million votes, with the majority voting for the button.
Do you want an edit button?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022
Our Take
The upcoming feature could be a great addition to Twitter as it will let you correct embarrassing typos or edit mistakes in a tweet that you may have hurriedly sent out. However, the option could open a can of worms if it allows users to revisit older tweets and change the contents to mislead others. This could be avoided by imposing a short time limit on the editability of tweets, which should be enough to fix typos. Gmail has a similar feature that lets you “undo” send for few seconds if you spot an error after hitting send. Its implementation doesn’t actually send the email as long as the “undo” button is shown on screen. Furthermore, adding an “edited” tag, indicating that the tweet has been changed, could also be a helpful addition to the feature. Slack messages and Reddit posts display the edited label when the content is changed after publishing.
Would you like to see an edit option for Twitter? How do you think it will implement the new feature? Let us know in the comments.
