Twitter users have long been begging for an ‘edit button’ to be added to the platform. In fact, the infamous requesting of an edit button has become a meme – that’s how long users have been requesting it for. Twitter (finally) have decided to give the people what they want by testing the feature with Twitter Blue subscribers in the coming months.
The premise is that you’ll be able to fix any typos or errors in a tweet without sacrificing any retweets, replies etc.
According to Twitter’s VP of consumer product, an edit button “has been the most requested Twitter feature for many years,” which makes complete sense – not being able to edit a Tweet after it goes live, and having to rather delete it and repost it can be a bit of social media nightmare, especially when time is of the essence. However, Jay Sullivan speaks an element of logic by saying that the feature could be misused to alter the record of public conversation.
As said by Twitter’s Jay Sullivan:
“Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation. Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work.”
Other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram already allow users to edit their posts but it hasn’t been accompanied by widespread abuse. Twitter, on the other hand, is a bit of a different story. With the majority of content going out on the platform being more news orientated, being able to edit this content later down the line after it has gone live is a very slippery slope. This is probably why Twitter is testing it with Twitter Blue to iron out the kinks and see what works and what doesn’t.
Even if the feature does work, there’s no confirmation that it will be rolled out to ordinary Twitter users – the company added an undo feature a while ago that lets users recall a tweet before they send it, but it is only available for Twitter Blue subscribers; hopefully that won’t (or will?) be the case for the edit feature, based on how testing goes in the coming months.
