After advances, denials, half confirmations, finally comes the button that allows you to edit tweets. Twitter communicates it: “If you see an edited tweet, it’s because we are testing the Edit button”.
The last to ask for the messages to be editable was Elon Musk, in the delirium of tweets following the announcement that he wanted to buy the social network. Musk launched a poll where he asked his followers to comment on it: the majority, it goes without saying, was in favor.
In fact, even Twitter had expressed itself positively, just a month earlier, from the official profile of the company: only that it was April 1st, and of course it was a joke. On the other hand, among the first comments on Musk’s poll was that of the current Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal, who urged people to “vote carefully”.
From a technological point of view, it is not a difficult function to implement, and in fact it is present on almost all other social networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. On Twitter, however, there is not, even if he has been talking about it for years. The motivation comes from founder (and former CEO) Jack Dorsey, in an interview with Wired: “We started 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 ”.
Of course, Twitter today is a very different social network compared to the beginning, and perhaps not everyone is aware of its distant relationship with SMS (and even less those for which it means something). However, despite the many changes (for example the passage from 140 to 280 characters for the maximum length of the tweets), the dogma of the immutability of the contents has so far always been respected. Although famous people with millions of followers, such as Kim Kardashian, who asked Dorsey directly both privately and publicly, have invoked an exemption.
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At Wired, Dorsey admitted good reasons for intervening on already published content, for example to correct a typo, but explained that possible malicious uses must also be considered, which have to do with disinformation and the will to deceive users. You may find yourself interacting with tweets that are profoundly different in content and tone than the original, and this could make conversations on the platform more confusing and animated than they already are. “We probably never will,” concluded Dorsey.
Instead. In the first screenshots you see under the tweet the symbol of a pencil and a writing “Last edited”, with the time and day of the last modification, which suggests that it is possible not only to modify the tweet, but also to do it repeatedly . It is not known whether it will also be possible to view the changes, as is the case with Facebook.
The first reactions of users do not seem so positive, many accuse the social network of having betrayed a fundamental principle. But from the Twitter account they seem certain that the time is ripe: “It’s really happening and everything will be fine”.
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