Twitter is working on an edit button. We know that thanks to the company’s many hints about the feature coming, as well as Elon Musk’s recent crusade campaign to get the darned thing finally live.
But how, exactly, will Twitter’s edit button work? The feature isn’t trivial to implement, as it opens potential for abuse; imagine, for example, someone tweeting a fun comment about the latest Nicolas Cage movie, getting a bunch of likes from celebrities, and then changing the tweet to a comment on how all bagels should be banned. Or something much worse.
Thanks to the work of mobile developer and leaker Alessandro Paluzzi, however, we now have a pretty good idea of how Twitter’s edit button might work.
Paluzzi recently shared screenshots of what appears to be Twitter’s test of the edit button. And on Friday, he followed up with screenshots that show the feature in action.
According to Paluzzi, tweets will be editable for only one hour after posting, so forget about editing that embarrassing tweet you posted years ago. Furthermore, edited tweets will display a blue sign saying “Edited,” which will likely be clickable to reveal the tweet’s edit history.
This sounds like a healthy mix, giving users the convenience to fix typos but also making it crystal clear that a tweet was editing and giving everyone insight into those edits. If the tweet was edited into something sinister, anyone who liked or retweeted will be able to see that (and prove that what they originally liked/retweeted was something else).
There’s still no word on when the feature might come. Twitter said in April that it plans to start testing the edit button in the “coming months.” If Paluzzi’s tweets are any indication, that timeline has been somewhat accelerated.
