Pigs have taken flight and hell is a frozen tundra because Twitter is testing an edit button.
On Thursday, Twitter announced that it will begin testing an “Edit Tweet” button internally with its team and then, in the coming weeks, to Twitter Blue, its paid premium service, for subscribers. In the blog post, Twitter says the test will let people make changes to their tweet “a few times” for 30 minutes after it’s been published.
“Edited Tweets will appear with an icon, timestamp, and label so it’s clear to readers that the original Tweet has been modified.” Viewers will also be able to see past versions of the tweet by tapping the “edited tweet” label.
Tweets written in haste or marred by typos have taken down many an impulsive Twitter user. Twitter says an edit button is its most requested feature. That being said, editing a tweet undermines the original concept of firing off a short, quippy message. Twitter has already moved away from its original vision by expanding the character limit from 140 to 280 and building a Twitter thread feature. It’s also part of a larger effort on Twitter’s part to combat rampant misinformation and contextualize conversations that may otherwise be misleading.
Twitter says that the goal of the new editing feature is to make tweeting “feel more approachable and less stressful” to users. And that the time limit and transparency of the edit history will ensure “the integrity of the conversation and create a publicly accessible record of what was said.” That edit history is much like what’s Apple‘s done with the ability to edit iMessages in iOS 16.
As expected, Twitter users are already buzzing over the news.
Whether editing tweets will be the boon we’ve all longed for or just a way to make more mess remains to be seen.
