Been wishing you could edit spelling mistakes out of your tweets without having to delete them? You're in luck: Twitter has announced that it's working on an edit feature.
At last.
The request for an edit button has become a meme in itself; Tweeters have been asking for this feature for literally years. If you use Twitter, you've most likely been in a situation where you posted a tweet from the previous evening and notice there's a missing letter or a missing comma that skews what you were trying to convey.
Twitter has confirmed that the feature will first arrive as a test for Twitter Blue users, which is its subscription service that brings benefits such as undoing a sent tweet after a short amount of time.
But while this sounds like good news for many, it may be an example of being careful what you wish for.
Analysis: This may hinder rather than help users
Other social platforms have had this feature for years. If you posted something on Facebook for example and it's missing a word, you can quickly edit the post and add the word back in.
Instagram and Tiktok also have similar features, but for Twitter, it's not as simple as adding an edit button.
Many users have wanted an easy method to edit a tweet without deleting it, especially if it's about a topic that's long since finished for example. But Twitter has a slippery slope with this, as many use the platform as a news feed and as a way of conversing with followers on certain subjects. Editing these tweets could make your input worse.
now that everyone is asking… yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year!no, we didn’t get the idea from a poll 😉we're kicking off testing within @TwitterBlue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible.April 5, 2022
But there are other dangers to this feature if it's not implemented right. Twitter's Head of Consumer Product, Jay Sullivan, rightly said during the announcement, that editing a tweet could alter a topic of conversation that could be sensitive to many, and could construe different meanings.
Editing tweets is not something that I've wanted Twitter to focus on - it's rather a bigger focus on curtailing abuse and spam accounts that have been more prevalent since the pandemic began in 2020.
But this feature could stay as a test, or as an exclusive feature of Twitter Blue. However, the announcement has excited many, so it now depends on whether the feature measures up to the wishes of its users, or if it's used to alter conversations for the worse.
Regardless of what happens, Twitter clearly has another challenge on its hands now that editing tweets are finally official.
