“Do you want a button to edit tweets?”: It didn’t take long, Elon Musk, to feel fully involved in the decisions concerning Twitter, the company he just became a partner in by buying over 9% of the shares.
And he did so by publishing a survey on the social network founded by Jack Dorsey, asking followers to comment on the so-called Edit Button, i.e. the possibility to modify the contents once published on the platform. The provocation of the Tesla owner was caught, perhaps with a hint of irony, also by the CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, who invited people to “vote carefully”.
History of a feature: the button to edit tweets
It seems strange that Musk’s first move after his Twitter investment could be devoted to such an insignificant issue from a technological point of view. The large majority of social networks, from Facebook to Instagram, up to LinkedIn, has for some time been offering users the opportunity to intervene ex post on the contents already published. On Twitter, however, this feature has never been implemented.
Yet editing tweets is a topic that has been talked about for a long time, even since the birth of the social network: it seems that one of the first requests dates back to 2006, a few months after the platform’s debut. One of the first users, a certain @livia, hoped for the possibility of intervening on the tweets to correct the typos.
The request went unheeded by Twitter for a long time. In 2015, it was even Kim Kardashian who asked via email to Jack Dorsey to insert this feature.
Despite the apparently positive reply from the founder of the social network, the topic remained unanswered, so much so that Kardashian herself reiterated the request in a conversation with Dorsey a few years later, in 2018.
In short, the so-called Edit Button is a sort of Godot, on whose waiting Twitter itself ended up joking. How last April 1stwhen a tweet from the company’s official profile seemed to have reopened the games, albeit on a notoriously unreliable date for communications of this kind.
Ok, but what’s the problem?
But if tweeting is so important to users (and relatively easy from a technological standpoint) why doesn’t Twitter do it? In a 2020 interview with The Verge, the then CEO, Jack Dorsey, explained the decision as follows: “We started out as an SMS service. And as you all know, when you send a message you can’t retract it, you can’t edit it. We wanted to preserve that style, that feeling ”.
In the interview, Dorsey stressed how, despite all the changes that have occurred since the founding of Twitter, Edit Button didn’t seem like something that important to him. If it is true, explained the then CEO of the platform, that there are good reasons to intervene ex post on the contents, such as correcting a typo, there can also be malicious applications, which have to do with disinformation and the will to deceive users. “We probably never will,” Dorsey commented in the interview.
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What could Twitter do
Now, however, the scenario has changed. And it is possible that, with Musk’s push, Agrawal must find a solution. The actual ability to edit tweets (as is possible on Facebookfor example) could be dangerous in an ecosystem based on information and not on relationships, in which it is very easy to be in contact with opinions and news published by users who do not know each other, with whom you may never have dealt with before.
This circumstance could push Twitter to a softer approach, close to the one already experienced for Twitter Blue users, the paid service born last summer. For those who subscribe, among the various possibilities, there is also an undo function: a 30-second window in which it is possible to review the tweet before publishing it definitively.
Another possibility, explored in a post on Bootcamp, the blog dedicated to user experience, is that of the evidence of the modification made. In other words, if Twitter were to decide to go even further, and therefore give the actual possibility to change the content once it is published, one way to make the process safer could be some sort of label showing that the tweet has been edited and how.