Twitter is adding an edit button

It’s a characteristic that Twitter customers have been requesting for therefore lengthy that it’s grow to be a meme, however now the legendary “edit button” is definitely turning into a actuality. Twitter has introduced that it’s working to permit customers to edit their tweets after posting them. The thought is that you simply’ll be capable of repair any typos or errors in a tweet with out sacrificing any replies, retweets, or likes it’s already accrued. Twitter plans to start testing the characteristic with Twitter Blue subscribers in “the approaching months,” the company said Tuesday.

Jay Sullivan, the corporate’s VP of client product, mentioned that enhancing has been “probably the most requested Twitter characteristic for a few years” in a thread on Tuesday. The corporate has been trying into the best way to construct the characteristic “in a secure method” since final 12 months.

“With out issues like cut-off dates, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could possibly be misused to change the file of the general public dialog,” he said. “Defending the integrity of that public dialog is our prime precedence once we method this work.”

Folks have been asking for an edit button for therefore lengthy that it’s grow to be one thing of an ongoing joke. “Tweets, however editable” has grow to be the usual response to discovering a typo in a well-liked tweet. However Twitter’s former CEO, Jack Dorsey, was reluctant so as to add such a characteristic up to now. Throughout a chat in 2018, Dorsey expressed concern that an edit button may let customers change a tweet’s which means after it will get broadly shared, and in 2020 he mentioned Twitter would “in all probability by no means” add the characteristic.

Issues like these have constantly cropped up round requests for an edit button. However as my colleague Casey Newton argued in 2017, quite a few different platforms, together with Fb, Medium, and Instagram, already enable customers to edit their posts, and the options haven’t been accompanied by widespread abuse. However that doesn’t imply that abuse is unprecedented. Based on Meta’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos, Fb’s enhancing characteristic has been abused up to now, in a single case to assist a cryptocurrency rip-off.

Twitter’s opinion on an edit button seems to have shifted after Parag Agrawal turned CEO. On April 1st, the annual day of company lies, Twitter’s official account mentioned it was “working on an edit button.” Though it was taken as a joke on the time, Twitter product lead Michael Sayman later pointed to the tweet as the corporate’s “official statement” on the characteristic.

Days later, after it emerged that Elon Musk had purchased a 9.2 % stake within the firm, the Tesla CEO’s first important tweet was to ballot his followers on whether or not Twitter ought to add an edit button. 73.4 % have been in favor.

The corporate already has an undo characteristic that permits you to recall a tweet earlier than you ship it, although it’s solely obtainable for Twitter Blue subscribers.