Despite tweeting “we are working on an edit button” on April Fools’ Day, it turns out Twitter wasn’t kidding around. The San Francisco-based social media company confirmed on Tuesday that an edit button is, indeed, in the works – a feature requested since last year.
Jay Sullivan, head of consumer product, said they’ve “been exploring how to build an Edit feature in a safe manner since last year and plan to begin testing it within Twitter Blue Labs in the coming months.” Additionally, Twitter announced from its communications team that no poll was consulted, giving an evident reference to the Tweet Elon Musk sent out following his 9.2% stake he took in the company on Monday. The tweet: “Do you want an edit button?” which gave voters the options “yse” or “on.”
Within an hour of the poll being posted, most voters selected “yse” rather than “on,” and as of Tuesday, nearly 75% of the 4.2 million votes were in favor of the edit button being implemented.
As it stands, Twitter users who find an error in their already-posted Tweet either have to delete it and repost it, or simply live with the mistake while making corrections in a thread. It should be noted that Twitter does offer an ‘undo’ button currently, but it’s only available to Twitter Blue subscribers.
In a 2020 interview with Wired, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that the company would “probably never” create an edit button, noting that while it would be helpful for some errors, it could give way to malicious changes to tweets. “You might send a tweet and then someone might retweet that, and then an hour later you completely change the content of that tweet and that person that retweeted the original tweet is now retweeting and rebroadcasting something completely different,” said Dorsey. “So that’s something to watch out for.”
Jay Sullivan warns users to be patient as a launch date for the edit button isn’t in sight just yet. “We will approach this feature with care and thoughtfulness and we will share updates as we go.”