After years of dilly-dallying, Twitter has confirmed that an edit button is in the works, which will allow users to change tweets after they have been posted. The company hasn’t posted anything about how it will go about the process. The move comes months after Jack Dorsey handed over the company’s operations to Parag Agrawal and hours after Tesla boss Elon Musk joined the social media network’s board.
The mythical “edit button” should allow users to fix typos or errors in a tweet without having to redo a tweet completely. Twitter plans to begin testing the feature with Twitter Blue subscribers in “the coming months”, the company has said. Jay Sullivan, the company’s VP of consumer product, said that editing has been “the most requested Twitter feature for many years” in a thread on Tuesday.
The challenge is to explore the feature “in a safe manner”. For example, a celebrity tweets something as simple as “I love dogs only”, which attracts a series of replies but then decides to edit it to reflect “I love cats only”, altering the conversation. “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,” Sullivan has said.
New board member Elon Musk started a poll on Monday, soon after disclosing that he owned a 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter, making him the firm’s biggest shareholder. The poll has already attracted over four million votes, mostly in favour of having an edit button.
The move is in sharp contrast to what former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey had said in 2018, that an edit button will “probably never” get added because of concerns about transparency. This is very different from the way Facebook and Instagram functions, which allows users to edit their posts.
With the new addition, the way Twitter functions will change quite a bit and perhaps attract new users. But one should also remember what Meta’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos has said in a tweet: “A lot of people are underestimating the abuse potential of an edit button. Recently looked at a massive cryptocurrency scam that was supported by automated editing of a verified FB page’s posts to create a legit-looking brokerage.”