Will a Twitter edit button exacerbate the issue of misinformation or simply fix typos?

Twitter has never been shy in rolling out updates to its service. It has offered us trending topics to browse through, increased the length of tweets from 140 to 280 characters, added lists, likes and bookmarks. Unlamented features such as Vine and Fleets have come and gone. But every time it made a change, the reply from many of its users was the same: “What about an edit button?”

If Twitter is about anything, it’s about brevity and speed. Keen to surf the crest of the wave of information, people quickly dash off posts and inevitably make mistakes in the process. They accidentally reply to the wrong people, make factual bloopers and spelling errors. It happens constantly, and many Twitter users yearn to be able to press a button to correct the mistake rather than delete the tweet and type it all out again. They’re baffled by the obstinate refusal of Twitter to implement what would seem to be a simple measure.

Twitter’s official account has been coy about the subject for years, often teasing users about their frustration. In May 2019, it posted: “FYI: there IS an edit button. (In your brain)”. A year later, as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world, it offered a deal: “You can have an edit button when everyone wears a mask.” (It quickly clarified that “everyone means EVERYONE”, ie, we probably shouldn’t expect such a button any time soon.) Last year, it revisited the subject in dismissive terms: “You don't need an edit button, you just need to forgive yourself.”

The issue has long been debated behind the scenes at Twitter HQ, but former chief executive and founder Jack Dorsey has been against it from the start. “We started as an SMS, text message service," he said in a video Q&A with Wired magazine in 2020. "And as you all know, when you send a text, you can’t really take it back. We wanted to preserve that vibe, that feeling.” But this is about more than a mere feeling. At the real root of the problem lies that old chestnut, misinformation.

When new Twitter board member Elon Musk tweeted a poll this week to canvass views on the implementation of an edit button, conservative commentator Liz Wheeler summed up the inherent difficulty in a reply: “What if a tweet goes viral, lots of retweets & millions of impressions, & then the author completely changes the meaning? Not just a grammatical fix, but a TOTAL ideological change? Or shameless self-promote?”

Twitter’s head of consumer product, Jay Sullivan, echoed this: “It could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation. Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work.”

There are, of course, ways around it. Imposing a time limit after posting during which any edits must be made, for example. Or maybe adopt the approach used by Facebook, where any edited posts are marked as such, alongside a log of any changes that have been made. Indeed, Facebook’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, tweeted on Wednesday that editing posts “wasn’t an issue”, and it had been “solved a long time ago”.

The vast majority of respondents to Musk’s poll certainly don’t see the problem, as they voted overwhelmingly for the convenience of correcting spelling mistakes over any concerns about integrity of information.

We’ll never know whether the poll had a direct effect, but it now appears that the tweet posted on Twitter’s account on April Fool's Day — which many thought was a joke — is actually true. “We are working on an edit button,” it reads. Twitter Support has now confirmed that the feature will be tested on Twitter’s paid subscribers to “learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible”.

So, those who are truly desperate to edit their tweets will have to pay for the privilege, at least at first. The rest will have to wait. That wait is unlikely to be a patient one.