Twitter confirms an edit button is in the works
FILE – In this April 26, 2017, file photo is a Twitter app icon on a mobile phone in Philadelphia. Tesla CEO Elon Musk now has a 9% stake in Twitter and a seat on its corporate board of directors, raising questions about how the billionaire business magnate could reshape the social media platform. He is now Twitter’s biggest shareholder and has the ear of top managers. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)
Testing on staging11
(NEXSTAR) – Twitter wasn’t joking on April Fools’ Day when they tweeted, “we are working on edit button.”
The San Francisco-based social media company confirmed Tuesday that they have been working on the long-requested feature since last year.
“We’ve been exploring how to build an Edit feature in a safe manner since last year and plan to begin testing it within Twitter Blue Labs in the coming months,” tweeted Jay Sullivan, head of consumer product.
Twitter added in an announcement from its communications team that no poll was consulted, apparently referencing Elon Musk.
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.” As of Tuesday afternoon, nearly 75% of the 4.2 million votes were for the edit button.
Currently, Twitter users are faced with a tough decision after spotting a typo in a published tweet – delete or live with it, making corrections in a thread.
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.
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.”
When an actual edit button might go live is not clear, and Sullivan warned users to be patient, adding, “We will approach this feature with care and thoughtfulness and we will share updates as we go.”