Can you edit a tweet? Typos are forever on Twitter for now, but edits may come soon to Twitter Blue subscribers.
Tweets are forever once they’ve been sent, full of typos and regretful thoughts abound. The only way to fix either is to delete the original tweet and try again – but that may be changing soon. Twitter says it is experimenting with giving its Twitter Blue subscribers the ability to edit their tweets.
April 4, news broke that Elon Musk had taken a 9.2% share in Twitter, granting him a board seat. The billionaire also started a simple Twitter poll on the platform, asking users, ‘Do you want an edit button?’ As of the time of writing, more than 4.4 million votes indicate that 73.6% of people want an edit button for Twitter.
Hardcore Twitter users have been against an edit button, but the general opinion seems to be that it would add to the platform. Twitter may find a compromise somewhere between full edit control and time-limited edits. For example, Reddit posts can only be edits in the first three minutes with no *EDIT* indicator. They can still be edited after that time limit, but the post shows up as having been edited.
“Yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year!” the company tweeted. “No, we didn’t get the idea from a poll. We’re kicking off testing within Twitter Blue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible,” Twitter continues.
Twitter is working hard to innovate its platform by adding several new features. During the pandemic, the social media giant cloned Clubhouse’s audio rooms with Twitter Spaces. But it has since evolved the feature to be more useful than the product it cloned. Twitter Spaces now offer artists a way to sell virtual tickets to performances with few headaches.
But not all of Twitter’s experiments have survived. Twitter also experimented with disappearing stories like Snapchat and Instagram. Twitter called them Fleets, but they lasted for less than a year before Twitter pulled the plug.