Elon Musk has continued to Elon Musk, floating the idea of a Twitter edit button just days after purchasing almost $3 billion worth of stock in the microblogging platform.
Fresh off acquiring a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO took to his account to ask his 80.3 million followers: “Do you want an edit button?”
As of writing Musk’s Twitter poll has received over 350,000 responses, and over 76 percent of them have been a resounding yes. Or rather, “yse,” as Musk seems to have deliberately misspelled the poll options to make his point.
Despite his recent acquisition, it’s unlikely Musk actually has the power to add new features to Twitter, much less an edit button. However, it undoubtedly gives him more influence regarding the company’s direction than other users.
Just a few days ago, Twitter itself teased the possibility that it would soon add an edit function, its official account tweeting that it is “working on an edit button.” However, astute users noted that Twitter’s declaration was posted on an inauspicious date: April 1, or April Fools’ Day.
When asked by Reuters whether this was a fakey or a true, Twitter released a statement saying, “We cannot confirm or deny but we may edit our statement later.” Judging by the joking tone of this response, I wouldn’t get my hopes up.
Twitter users have been begging for an edit button for literal years. Currently, if you make a typo or grammar mistake in a tweet, the only way to fix it is to delete and repost the entire tweet, losing all its accumulated likes and retweets in the process.
Unfortunately, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey has been very clear that an edit button is not something that’s likely to happen. To be fair, he has a good reason for this.
“You might send a tweet and then someone might retweet that, and then 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,” Dorsey said in a 2020 interview with Wired. “So that’s something to watch out for.”
