Twitter's edit feature may keep digital traces of earlier tweets

NEW DELHI: Twitter is working on the edit button, as requested by its users as well as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, but the micro-blogging platform is reportedly going to keep a digital trace of your earlier tweets.

App researcher and reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong said in a tweet that the edit button may have an “immutable” quality.

“Looks like Twitter’s approach to Edit Tweet is immutable, as in, instead of mutating the Tweet text within the same Tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the amended content, along with the list of the old Tweets prior of that edit,” Wong posted late on Saturday..

It is still not clear how a tweet’s edit history will appear to users.

Initially, the edit button will be available to Twitter Blue users and will be extended to all users at a later stage.

App researcher Alessandro Paluzzi also tweeted screenshots of the new edit tool, showing how the “Edit Tweet” option could appear in the three-dot menu on the right side of your tweets.

Earlier this week, Twitter announced that it is working to allow users to edit their tweets after posting them to fix typos and errors.

The micro-blogging platform said Twitter plans to begin testing the feature with Twitter Blue subscribers in “the coming months.”

“Now that everyone is asking… yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year!,” said the company.

“We didn’t get the idea from a poll (by Elon Musk). We’re kicking off testing within @TwitterBlue. Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible,” Twitter posted.

Jay Sullivan, the company’s VP of consumer product, said that the edit button has been the most requested Twitter feature for many years.

“People want to be able to fix (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes, typos and hot takes in the moment. They currently work around this by deleting and tweeting again,” Sullivan said.

Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, “Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation,” he commented.