Could Elon Musk cause Twitter to finally get an edit button?

(NEXSTAR) – If you use Twitter you’ve likely found yourself face to face with a spelling error in one of your tweets but, with no way to edit it, you couldn’t do anything about it. Could that be changing?

Twitter does offer an ‘undo’ button to its Twitter Blue subscribers, which allows users to cancel a tweet before anyone else sees it. But even being a paying subscriber doesn’t give you access to a simple edit button. Currently, if you want to change a tweet, you’d have to delete and rewrite it, or correct it in a thread.

On Monday, after becoming the social media platform’s largest outside stakeholder, Elon Musk tweeted a poll asking followers if they wanted an edit button. Within an hour of the poll being posted, the majority of voters selected “yse” rather than “on.”

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal retweeted Musk’s poll, saying, “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully,” copying a March tweet by Musk.

Tweets and polls aside, Twitter did tweet on Friday, April 1 that they “are working on an edit button.” Unfortunately, considering the tweet came on April Fools’ Day, it’s unclear if Twitter is actually working on a highly requested feature.

According to Reuters, when asked whether it was real, a Twitter spokesperson told them, “We cannot confirm or deny but we may edit our statement later.” 

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in a 2020 interview with Wired that the company would “probably never” create an edit button, noting that while it would be helpful for some errors, it could give way to malicious changes to tweets.

“You might send a tweet and then someone might retweet that, and then an hour later you completely change the content of that tweet and that person that retweeted the original tweet is now retweeting and rebroadcasting something completely different,” Dorsey said. “So that’s something to watch out for.”

Twitter finally getting an edit button may also be something to watch out for.