An”edit button” is one of the platform’s most highly requested features.
Twitter has said it will begin testing a new edit feature in the coming months.
The news came on the same day it announced that entrepreneur Elon Musk would join the social media company’s board.
Musk wasted no time making his Twitter priorities clear, quickly setting up a poll for his 80 million followers asking if they wanted to be able to edit their tweets after posting them.
Do you want an edit button?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022
The poll has more than 4.4 million votes, with 73.6% supporting the feature, and 26.4% voting no.
Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal asked users to “vote carefully” on Musk’s poll. However, the company clarified that it did not get the idea to introduce an edit button from the poll and has been working on developing it since last year.
The “edit button” is one of the most highly requested features of the social media platform. The idea is that it would allow users to fix any typos after publishing their tweets – but some say it could do more harm than good.
For example, users could completely change the meaning of tweets after they’ve been liked and retweeted by others, which could be used for trolling.
So when the feature does kick in, Twitter says it may have a will likely have a few restrictions.
Jay Sullivan, Twitter’s head of consumer products, 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”. Because of this, it will take some time to fine tune the feature before it’s made available to all users.
Twitter will start testing the feature within its Twitter Blue Labs – a subscription service offering users exclusive access to premium features – over the next few months. Through this trial, it says it can “learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible”.
Twitter had initially said it was looking into an edit button on 1 April, but the announcement was widely interpreted as an April Fool’s joke.
