Twitter has finally confirmed what its fans have been hoping for years: an edit button is in the works.
It comes after Tesla billionaire Elon Musk; the social media site’s newest and now largest shareholder, posted a poll on Tuesday (5th April, 2022) asking if people would like to see an edit button, with 73.6 percent of respondents saying yes.
Do you want an edit button?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022
Twitter, on the other hand, said in a post on Tuesday that it has been working on an edit button since 2021 and will begin testing it in the coming months within its paid subscription product, Twitter Blue.
Twitter’s head of product, Jay Sullivan, announced the news, saying it had been the company’s most requested feature for several years, but warned that it could be misused if it didn’t come with appropriate controls.
“Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited,” Sullivan said.
“When we approach this work, protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority,” he said. “We’ll take this feature slowly and thoughtfully, and we’ll keep you updated as we go.”
Even though many people have been requesting the change for years; the news of the impending update has been met with mixed reactions, with many claiming that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits.
I believe that the bad outweighs the good of the twitter edit button; because with so many controversial viewpoints and cyberbullies, one could tweet and then edit it after a large number of people have agreed with that particular tweet, and with the common misconception that states retweet equal endorsements, it is going to be bad at the end of the day, but at the same time. I won’t overlook how important this new feature would be, especially with typos.
It’s always a pain when you’re tweeting a thread and realize you’ve made a mistake, and deleting the entire tweet means you’ll have to start over.
In a nutshell, I genuinely think Twitter should provide a history feature that allows users to view tweets before they were edited.
Some twitter users were concerned that the introduction of the “Twitter Blue” would lead to the monetization of the service, but we’ll have to wait and see how things play out because, as it stands, only users with the Twitter Blue receive the edit feature when it is released, before it is passed down to the regular free users.
