Twitter is finally giving in.
The social media giant announced Tuesday that, yes, it’s actually for real working on an edit button that it plans to start testing in the “coming months.” And no, it hastened to add, this move has nothing to do with Elon Musk.
“yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year,” wrote the company. “no, we didn’t get the idea from a poll”
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The “poll” in question was one run by newly emboldened Twitter shareholder and soon to be board member Elon Musk, who on April 4 asked Twitter users if they wanted an edit button added to the platform.
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Notably, Twitter has long been opposed to letting users edit tweets after they’ve gone live. The logic, explained by then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in 2020, still makes as much sense now as it did then.
“You might send a tweet and then someone might retweet that and an hour later you completely change the content of that tweet and that person that retweeted the original tweet is now retweeting and rebroadcasting something completely different,” he said in an interview with Wired.
We reached out to Twitter and asked if it is no longer worried about the scenario described by Dorsey. A company spokesperson said Twitter had nothing else to say on that specific matter at this time, but did point us to an April 5 thread from Jay Sullivan, Twitter’s head of consumer product, that essentially amounted to an admission that this could all go terribly wrong.
“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,” wrote Sullivan in part. “Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work.”
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Tweet may have been deleted
Now that Dorsey is out, the top brass at Twitter have apparently decided to try out throwing a giant edit-button wrench in the Twitter machine.
Good luck with that.
