Elon Musk and Twitter’s edit feature experiment

Twitter has announced that it is working on an edit button, but denied that the idea came from the company’s new largest stakeholder Elon Musk.

The social media giant last night tweeted “we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year”, adding “we didn’t get the idea from a poll” alongside a winking emoji. 

The news that the company is working on the new feature immediately gave rise to rumours that it was Musk’s idea. The Tesla billionaire ran a Twitter poll on the question yesterday, shortly after the announcement that he was joining Twitter’s board.

‘Kicking off testing’

An edit function has long been “a sought-after feature on the site to correct typos or embarrassing mistakes”, The Guardian reported. Currently users are forced to “work around it by deleting and reposting the tweet”.

Twitter said that it is “kicking off testing” with a selection of people signed up for the company’s subscription product – Twitter Blue – in the coming months. 

Jay Sullivan, head of consumer product at the social media giant, tweeted: “Edit 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.

“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 said. “Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work.”

Sullivan’s intervention speaks to longstanding concerns about “how to execute” an edit feature on the site where tweets often go viral with hundreds of thousands of retweets, the BBC said. It is expected that the feature will allow users to amend or change tweets “without losing any replies, retweets or likes it has already gained”.

Former CEO Jack Dorsey has been “​​reluctant to add such a feature in the past”, The Verge reported, citing the concern that it “could let users change a tweet’s meaning after it gets widely shared”. In 2020, he said during a Wired question-and-answer video that the company would “probably never” add the feature.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/technology/956346/elon-musk-twitter-edit-feature