In June 2021, Twitter told the world “you don’t need an edit button, you just have to forgive yourself.” Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is even adamant against Kim Kardashian’s pleas when she cornered him at Kanye West’s birthday party in 2018. For years, the platform resisted editing tweets. Until now. An edit button is imminent — but conundrums remain about how it can be deployed without causing chaos.
“Everybody thinks it’s easy to just add an edit button,” said Christina Wodtke, a computer science lecturer at Stanford University. Wodtke, who has worked on product design projects at LinkedIn, MySpace, Zynga and Yahoo, argues that such a seemingly simple change would require a lot of careful thought. She offers a hypothetical scenario: Donald Trump – whose return to Twitter has some fearing more could happen since. Elon Musk joins Twitter board—Put something shocking or offensive. He then edited his post to blur its rough edges. But people responded to the content of the first tweet, rendering their response meaningless.
The obvious solution to that is a Slack or Facebook-like change log of edits, where anyone can see a history of changes on a post. Facebook has allowed people to edit posts since June 2012 — but it’s a feature frequently abused by scammers since its launch. Alex Stamos, former chief security officer of Facebook and now an assistant professor at Stanford, note that Facebook’s post editing tools helped legitimize a crypto scam page to trick users. Page editing is a core feature of Wikipedia, but that leads to “editing wars” where individuals argue over the wording of an entry, including 11 years battle about the origin of the Caesar salad. Similar third-party tools exist for Twitter bios such as Spoonbillcan track how a person’s profile has been modified over time.
However, such tracking comes with its own set of problems, Wodtke said. For one, the user who edited the post may not want the original text to be accessible. “There’s all this complexity going on around how all the players in the system will react to this change,” she said. “You have to think about all these standards that you’re violating and changing.” Simply put, you need to design any new feature of this nature with a worst-case scenario. Even if the majority of people use the edit button to avoid typos, if a small minority use it for nefarious purposes, it can cause chaos. “A prominent fear is that it only leads to more confusion and burnout on Twitter,” she said.
In an effort to fix the problem, Twitter will begin by testing the editing feature among users of Twitter Blue, its paid subscription service, in the coming months. Editing tweets was Twitter’s most requested feature ‘for years’ Jay Sullivan declared, the platform’s head of consumer products. Twitter has also said that development on the feature has been ongoing since 2021 — removing any claims that a poll Musk, asking users if they want an edit button, is the man behind the decision.
The edit button announcement was welcomed by many — but raised concerns among others. Sullivan acknowledges that ensuring editing is used honestly can require “time limits, control, and transparency over what has been edited.” So how do you code for honesty? Simply put, the way Twitter designs, tests, and implements editing will determine its success — and can make or break the platform. “Is there a risk?” Christopher Bouzy, founder of Bot Sentinel, an inauthentic behavior tracking service on Twitter, asked Christopher Bouzy. “Sure. It can change the context of a tweet.” Misinformation and misinformation – the former intentionally sharing incorrect information, the latter unintentionally – are not Twitter’s accurate syndication and the platform’s viral dynamics mean that some posters don’t like editing inaccurate information. One 2018 academic report found that fake news travels six times faster than truth on Twitter, in large part because false news is 70% more likely to be retweeted than fact-based posts.
