It’s happening, everybody. Twitter has finally, officially announced it is adding an edit button. No, it’s not a late April Fools joke. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with that poll Twitter’s newest board member tweeted recently, apparently.
Do you want an edit button?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022
The official Twitter Comms account broke the news last night that the company is adding an edit button. Eventually. It said it would be testing the feature in Twitter Blue Labs first “in the coming months”.
Twitter’s vice president of consumer product Jay Sullivan said that the edit feature has been Twitter’s most requested feature for many years and that Twitter has actually been working on it since 2021.
2/ Edit has been the most requested Twitter feature for many years. People want to be able to fix (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes, typos and hot takes in the moment. They currently work around this by deleting and tweeting again.
— Jay Sullivan (@jaysullivan) April 5, 2022
So the fact that Musk became Twitter’s largest shareholder, tweeted a poll asking if people wanted an edit button, and was then appointed to its board of directors all in the past few weeks is probably all just a big fat coincidence, right?
When it does eventually add the edit feature, the platform will need to be careful in how it implements it. In his thread, Sullivan said as much.
“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.”
There is a sort of example out in the wild. An Australian Twitter Blue subscriber said she was able to edit her tweets up to sixty seconds after tweeting. This, along with an edit history, could be important additions to the feature when it makes its way to the general public.