What you need to know
- Twitter announced on April Fools' Day that it's working on bringing an edit feature to the platform.
- The company has apparently been working on the feature since last year.
- The edit feature will be tested in the coming months on Twitter Blue Labs.
- The news comes just after it was announced that Elon Musk is being appointed as a Twitter chair.
In a surprise announcement on Tuesday, Twitter says that it is working on bringing an edit button to the platform. The information comes several days after the company seemingly joked about it on April Fools' Day.
According to Twitter, the edit feature has been in the works since last year. However, it seems we're still a ways off from its launch, and it will start testing "in the coming months" on Twitter Blue Labs.
The announcement tweet includes a glimpse of how the feature could work, with the user selecting the three-dot menu at the top right corner of a tweet and selecting the "Edit Tweet" option.
👀 pic.twitter.com/I13wE3eLdnApril 5, 2022
Unfortunately, the GIF stops short of showing us the composer and how the tweet would look after it was edited.
The edit button has been a highly requested feature on Twitter for years, simply due to the fact that typos happen and can kinda ruin an otherwise great tweet. Twitter has seemingly been adamant about not bringing it to the platform, opting instead to launch "Undo Tweet" for Twitter Blue users, which provides a five-second delay for a user to retract their tweet.
Of course, other apps such as Instagram and Facebook give users the ability to edit their posts. Instagram went so far as to tease Twitter for lacking the option.
The announcement comes just after it was revealed that Elon Musk would be joining the Twitter board following his purchase of a nearly 10% stake in the company. Twitter joked that the decision to bring an edit button to the platform wasn't the result of a poll — a nod to Musk who recently tweeted a poll asking if users wanted an edit button.
The poll was retweeted by Twitter's new CEO, Parag Agrawal, who said the results of the poll "will be important."
The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully. https://t.co/UDJIvznALBApril 5, 2022
Still, while having an edit button could help us all fix our typos, there is concern that the feature could be abused. In an interview in 2020, former CEO Jack Dorsey was asked if Twitter would add an edit button, to which he simply responded "No." His reasoning was that if someone tweets something that gets retweeted by a lot of people, that person could then edit the tweet to have a completely different meaning and intent. He seemed to suggest that the now-available "Undo Tweet" option was the best way to go for simple typos, saying that Twitter would "probably never" bring an edit button to the platform.
Apparently, with the new CEO and now with Musk on the board, Twitter is seemingly in for some welcome changes.
Jay Sullivan, the head of consumer product at Twitter, explained how the edit button is one way that Twitter is hoping to give users more control over how they engage with others on the app. He points out similar concerns that Dorsey expressed, saying that the company needs to approach this with "care and "thoughtfulness."
"Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation," Sullivan says in a series of tweets. "Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work."
