I could sure use one.
Here is the AP’s Tari Arbel:
Twitter tweeted Tuesday that it is indeed working on a way for users to edit their 280-character messages, although it says the project has nothing to do with the fact that edit-function fan Elon Musk was just revealed as the company’s largest shareholder and now sits on its board.
Twitter said it will test the feature in its paid service, Twitter Blue, in the coming months. It said the test would help it “learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible.” So it may be a while before most Twitter users get to use it, if they ever do. Twitter spokesperson Catherine Hill declined to say whether an edit feature might be rolled out for all users.
Many Twitter users — among them, Kim Kardashian, Ice T, Katy Perry and McDonald’s corporate account — have long begged for an edit button. The company itself recently teased users with an April Fool’s Day tweet saying “we are working on an edit button.” The official Twitter account said Tuesday that the April 1 tweet wasn’t a joke and that it has been working on it since last year.
Read the rest here.
But Molly Roberts of The Washington Post raises some important points:
The problem is, for every righteous typo-averse citizen, there’s a bad actor eager to game any new system. Imagine someone revising a tweet after it has gone viral, so that a heartwarming video of a tiger nursing an orphaned piglet is replaced with misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus. Dangerous content could travel across the Internet incognito; likers and retweeters of the original, inoffensive version could be accused of approving of the incendiary revision.
People who post hateful or harassing material could also edit it after the fact, skeptics have suggested, and evade enforcement before going out and repeating the offense. Think of Donald Trump altering his declarations of a stolen election to avoid discipline after he learns exactly what language needs exactly what changes to avoid crossing a line — and arguing he’s not a repeat rule-breaker after all. If he’d had the chance to do as much editing as he did tweeting during his scheduled “executive time,” his account might still be around.
These criticisms don’t really make the case for no button at all. They make the case for a well-designed button. If you want to let people revise inconsequential errors but not recast entire narratives, limit the number of characters they can alter. If you want to allow in-the-moment reconsiderations without risking an already-popular tweet transforming before millions of people’s eyes, restrict the time window for tweaks.
Read Roberts’s piece here.