An edit button is something many Twitter users have been clamoring for for some time. The need for such is obvious if you’ve ever published a tweet and minutes later discovered a typo in it. If so, your only option is to delete the tweet and repost it as fresh. Of course, any likes or retweets your typo-laden original tweet got will be lost.
But an edit button on Twitter can be a dangerous thing. For example, people could use it to troll the crap out of others. Say someone posted a tweet saying “I love Trump” and several Republican Senators then retweeted that tweet. The person who originally posted the tweet could then change it to “I hate Trump” and thus make the people who retweeted the original tweet look like they aren’t fans of the president. That’s a concern Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey brought up while speaking at an event in New Delhi, India, recently, reports TNW:
You have to pay attention to what are the use cases for the edit button. A lot of people want the edit button because they want to quickly fix a mistake they made. Like a misspelling or tweeting the wrong URL. That’s a lot more achievable than allowing people to edit any tweet all the way back in time.
Dorsey went on to say:
We have been considering this for a while and we have to do in the right way. We can’t just rush it out. We can’t make something which is distracting or takes anything away from the public record.
So the good news is an edit button may be coming to Twitter sometime in the future, but it will be limited in its scope.
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