An edit button has been the most requested feature on Twitter to date, and as of today, the company is finally giving users what they’ve been asking for.
Amid a high-profile lawsuit over its future ownership and a host of other controversies to boot, Twitter today confirmed a new feature to edit tweets. It’s starting internal testing and the plan is to make the Edit Tweet functionality available to subscribers of its paid tier, Twitter Blue, later this month.
Twitter Blue is currently only available in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US, and the firm hasn’t said what its plans are to roll out the subscription plan to other countries — much less what its plans are for rolled out the Edit Tweet feature to the rest of its 237.8 million unpaid users.
In July, people criticized the company for raising the prices of the Twitter Blue subscription; perhaps the introduction of the Edit Tweet feature will offset that increase.
For those who WILL get the Edit Tweet feature, the rules are basic: Eligible users will have a 30-minute window to edit their tweets, and the edited tweet will appear with a label showing a timestamp of the edit. People reading the tweet can tap the tag to see the tweet’s edit history.
Image credits: I tweet
For those who have been following the progress of Twitter and the edit feature, you’ll notice that this implementation is mostly in line with what app sleuths found about the feature after Twitter officially announced it was working on an edit button back in April. Last month, the app’s researchers pointed out how edited tweets can behave when embedded on different sites. The firm said embedded tweets will not change on the page, even if they are later edited to preserve the original essence of the story.
We’ve asked Twitter for clarification and will update the story if we hear back.
Notably, the social media platform now offers an “Undo Tweet” button for Twitter Blue subscribers that gives users a 30-second window to unpost a tweet if they spot an error. The company said it will continue to offer this feature after it launches the Edit Tweet button.
There are certain gray areas that arise as a result of hitting an edit button.
For starters, it could potentially play a role in how Twitter is adopted by the media. These days, tweets – whether from companies, politicians, artists, businessmen or just ordinary people – are often used as the basis of news. Making these tweets editable will burden publishers with tracking a tweet to check if its content has been changed. (Of course, it’s just one more thing for publishers to track, as stories often evolve; and if a tweet is inserted and then deleted, that can change a story, too.)
There is also the question of how regulators will view an edited tweet when it comes to content that may be in violation of a country’s laws.
The company said in the blog post that the purpose of the Edit Tweet feature is to give people a short period of time to fix things like typos, add missing tags and more. However, there is no limit to what you can edit in a tweet and what consequences these edits can have.
“With Edit Tweet, we hope to make Tweeting easier and more accessible, giving people more choice and control in how they express themselves and how they contribute to the many conversations happening on Twitter,” the company said in a statement. blog post.
Twitter added that it’s rolling out the feature to a smaller group of paid users to gather more feedback, including how people might misuse it — so it can adjust the edit button’s functionality accordingly. circumstances.
“Since this is our most requested feature to date, we want to make sure we get it right,” he said.
This could mean that Twitter could make it more widely available over time, rather than a feature limited only to those willing to pay for the privilege, only in places where Twitter has set its level of payment.
The company has seen an editing feature several times over the years.
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder who was CEO until he stepped down in November 2021, said Twitter considered but ultimately wouldn’t build the feature, a sentiment echoed by its executives. All of that apparently changed quickly this year under new management and public products from Musk as he bought shares in Twitter to make his buying move.
The news could give Twitter some goodwill at a critical time.
The company is in the middle of a high-profile feud with Elon Musk, whose offer earlier this year to buy the company for $44 million was accepted by Twitter, only for Musk to turn around and try to back out of the deal. praying that Twitter did not disclose complete data about its users (and especially bots). This has turned into a complex legal drama, potentially fueled by other developments, such as allegations by Twitter’s former security chief that Twitter mishandled security and user data, which became public just last week .
Additionally, there appears to have been some controversial product development. or report to threshold revealed that Twitter was working on an OnlyFans competitor, but only stopped after an internal report pointed out disability platform for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual nudity at scale. During all this, many senior executives have left the company and its stock price has been on a rollercoaster (mostly down) for the past year.
