Twitter on Tuesday announced it will begin testing an edit feature for tweets “in the coming months.” The company says the edit button has been its “most requested” feature for many years and it will begin the testing with Twitter Blue, its paid subscription service.
On April 1st, the company announced on its official account “we are working on an edit button” but many thought it was an April fool’s joke. On Tuesday after announcing once again it was working on the edit feature, the company followed up with a tweet and said “ps: we weren’t joking.” After the news was reported that Elon Musk is now Twitter’s largest shareholder, the Tesla CEO made another poll to his followers asking if they want an edit button, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal quoted the tweet saying its consequences will be important and urged people to “vote carefully.”
Head of Consumer Product at Twitter, Jay Sullivan in a thread on Tuesday said the company has “been exploring how to build an Edit feature in a safe manner since last year.” “People want to be able to fix (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes, typos and hot takes in the moment. They currently work around this by deleting and tweeting again,” he added. “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. Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work.”
In 2020 in a Wired Q&A, former CEO Jack Dorsey the company would “probably never” add an edit button it seems the stance has changed since Agrawal became the CEO. Twitter currently has an undo tweet feature that is available to Twitter Blue subscribers and the company says it will “learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible” when it beings testing the edit feature.
