Twitter Inc. is launching an edit button for the first time, after years of debate both internally and externally as to whether such a feature was a good idea for a product known for making posts go viral.
The edit feature will soon be available to users who pay $4.99 per month for a subscription to Twitter Blue. Edit Tweet, as the feature will be called, will let users make changes to their tweet for up to 30 minutes after it’s originally published. Tweets that are edited will carry a label, and others on Twitter will be able to click on the label to see prior versions of the post.
The company is specifically testing the edit button with a small group of users in hopes of quickly resolving possible issues, the company wrote in a blog post. The edit button will then roll out to Twitter Blue users in the coming weeks.
Twitter has debated the pros and cons of an edit button for years, with some worried that it will be abused by people hoping to go viral, only to change the content of a message after it’s been retweeted. Former CEO Jack Dorsey said as recently as January 2020 that an edit button was highly unlikely, but it was so widely requested that the company never made a definitive call on whether it would launch something.
That debate snowballed earlier this year when Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk took a large ownership stake in the company, then polled his followers on whether they wanted an edit button. The majority of those who voted said yes. Twitter quickly confirmed it was already testing the feature internally, and in an apparent effort to distance the project from Musk’s influence, clarified that it started work on an edit button before Musk’s poll.
