Twitter has revealed that it’s been working on an edit button feature for some time, and will be testing it out in the coming months. And no, Elon Musk’s recent poll had nothing to do with it.
The Tesla CEO made headlines recently for acquiring a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the largest shareholder of a company he frequently uses and misuses. One of Musk’s first acts following the share grab was to tweet a poll asking if users would like an edit button.
Now Twitter’s official Comms channel has revealed that it has indeed been working on an edit feature, and that it will be rolling out a test in the coming months via its TwitterBlue Labs.
As you can see, Twitter is claiming that it’s been working on the feature since 2021, and explicitly heads of any suggestion that Musk’s crude poll was a drive for the feature.
As if to illustrate that this feature has been cooking for a while, Twitter issued a follow-up tweet highlighting an early version of the edit button in action. The attached GIF shows how an Edit Tweet button has been inserted in the … menu to the top right of an individual tweet, right below the Delete/pin options.
This move might well have nothing to do with Musk, but the news just so happens to coincide with that of Musk officially joining the Twitter board. Apparently, part of the condition for Musk joining up has been that he limit his maximum stake in the company to 15%.
There is no mention of ‘adding an edit button’ being part of that agreement, but it seems Musk is going to get his own way at any rate.
Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey always resisted the suggestion of adding an edit button, fearing that it would damage public discourse to be able to alter a tweet’s meaning after it had been shared and reacted to.