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Twitter’s edit button is finally here, but not for everyone

After months of will they, won’t they, Ross finally ended up with Rachel Twitter finally has an edit button. The feature is currently only available for Twitter Blue subscribers. We’re hoping it doesn’t stay that way. There are still 237 million unpaying users to think about, Twitter.

For the time being, only four countries can access Twitter Blue: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S. The company confirmed the addition itself through a tweet yesterday.

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Credits: Twitter

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For now, the feature is confined to internal testing before heading to Blue subscribers’ apps later in the month. The original edited tweet has been taken down (why? Nobody knows) and was replaced with a regular tweet explaining the addition. Lame.

If you’re one of the few with the ability to edit tweets, you’ll only have 30 minutes to make changes before the button disappears. After that, the tweet has the same fate as every other tweet – delete it or keep it. Once a tweet has been edited, everyone else will be able to see when it was edited and visit the tweet’s history.

There currently aren’t any limitations on what can and can’t be edited in a tweet, leaving the feature open to some criticism. Users may see it as an opportunity to change their minds entirely on a subject, and display that to the world. Yes, others can see a tweet’s edit history, though many viewers may not be aware that exists at first.


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It also leaves a question of how regulators will tackle the edit button. Which tweet do they look at when deciding if the content is in violation of Twitter regulations? Or when a tweet violates a country’s laws? It’s something that will need to be figured out before it could be considered going global.

“Since this is our most requested feature to date, we want to make sure we get it right,” Twitter said.

The wording here makes it seem like the Twitter Blue subscribers are test subjects for the feature, with Twitter fixing the issues before releasing it to the rest of us. Let’s hope this is the case.

Source: TechCrunch

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