Twitter’s edit button has been a joke for longer than I can remember, but it’s finally officially becoming a reality — and Jane Manchun Wong, who makes it her mission to find hidden quirks in companies’ code, just told us has given our first real look at what it might look like.
As you might expect, the editing part is very simple: press a button called “Edit Tweet” in the drop-down context menu, and then you can edit a tweet. Currently, it looks like you’ll have 30 minutes after publishing a tweet to hit that button; it will open a window with all your original content laid out in front of you and you can publish whatever you want – delete it all and start over if you want. It’s not just for typos.
the current unreleased version of Edit Tweet reloads media (images, videos, GIFs, etc) instead of reusing them. Inefficient use of bandwidth and media processing power can also be wasteful. plus it turns my video into an image (mishandling the media type) pic.twitter.com/HjoIA0CZhO
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 2, 2022
The bigger question, of course, is what happens next — how can readers figure out if you messed with your tweets after the fact, and what you messed with? This is also pretty simple: there’s a little “Edited” button that will appear next to the timestamp, and you can click that to go to an Edit History page that should theoretically show all previous versions of that the tweet.
(Ignore the “edit: soup” bit in the tweet above, Wong added it for dramatic effect.)
Importantly, as Wong mentioned a few weeks ago, Twitter appears to be making each individual tweet immutable – each version has its own ID, none of them are deleted, and it’s not clear whether Twitter’s backend will automatically distribute the latest version to the Internet. If you are, say, reading a eve story with an old embed that was rewritten, will you now see the new tweet or the old one? Unclear!
But even if you’re looking at the old, unedited version of the tweet, Twitter will let you know about it. See “There’s a new version of this Tweet” below? If you click it, it should immediately take you to the newest version.
Sum it up, and Wong tells me he thinks it will maybe work like this:
Trump first tweets “covefe”, tweets get ID #1, people embed ID #1
then Trump creates a new edit “coffee”, the new edit (technically a new tweet) gets ID #2, while the original tweet (#1) becomes the first version of the Tweet
and then in the embedded tweet that still shows the number 1, it now shows the “there is a new version of this Tweet” indicator
It makes sense to me. And it certainly sounds a lot like the solution eve Contributing editor Casey Newton suggested in 2017:
I propose an option in the dropdown menu of an inverted tweet that reads: “edit tweet”. Tap it and you can correct any mistakes and reprint. The new version is served across Twitter wherever the tweet exists, including retweets and tweets. Next to the tweet’s timestamp, a new prominent word appears: “edited.” Tap the word and Twitter displays previous versions of the tweet below the latest version.
Except here, it sounds like Editing History it could be another page instead of unfolding neatly underneath.
Keep in mind that Wong has not yet been able to publish any completed and edited tweets to Twitter’s current backend, so these findings are many tentative. She discovered it all by running the application on the client side, letting her see the user interface in action.
