Most Twitter users have an experience: you start a quick tweet, realize it has a typo, then annoyed, you can’t click “edit” to fix it. Twitter users have been clamoring for an edit button for years.
Elon Musk, who recently bought shares in the microblogging platform and made an offer of $48 billion (about 3,67,080 crore) company-wide, asked his 82 million followers if they would want an edit button or not. His (deeply counter-scientific) poll drew 4.4 million responses, with 73 percent in favor.
Other social media platforms allow you to edit posts once you’ve submitted them. Looks like it would be a simple feature to add – so why not Twitter do it? Well, the time may have finally come. Independent of Musk’s poll, Twitter has confirmed that an edit button may be working. Bold users have even managed to get some hints as to what it might look like.
So what’s the fuss about? Why is Twitter deprecating the edit button? The answer may be that it is not as simple as it appears.
The first thing to know about tweets is that, unlike posts on many other platforms, Twitter has essentially no way to pull them back once they’ve been sent. The reason is that Twitter has what is called an Application Programming Interface (or API) that allows third parties like other apps or researchers to download tweets in real time.
That’s what powers Twitter clients like TweetDeck, TweetBot, Twitteriffic, and Echofon, which together account for about 6 million users.
Once the third parties have downloaded the tweets, Twitter has no way to get them back or edit them. It’s a bit like an email – once I’ve sent it and you’ve downloaded it, there’s no way for me to delete it from your machine.
If a user edits a tweet, what Twitter can do is send a message saying “please edit this tweet” – but the third party can choose whether or not to actually do that. (This is now what happens when tweets are “deleted.”) Cats and dogs More importantly, an edit button can have unintended consequences and can be weaponized.
Consider this. I, a cat lover, decided to tweet “I love cats!” Then you, also a cat lover (why wouldn’t you be), decided to quote my tweet, agreeing “Me too!” (Remember when Twitter used to be this innocent?) Now, what if I edited my original tweet to declare “I love dogs”? Now you are wrongly described as a dog lover and when your cat-loving friends see this (they will see this when I reply to your tweets, mentioning all of them), they will say deny you.
Yes, this has been created, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the edit button can be used in this fashion, especially by things like armies of bots. Would Twitter users be happy to trade this ability for the convenience of correcting typos in their tweets? ‘Warts and all’: a bug or a feature? Twitter has built its reputation as the most “real-time” social media platform – where earthquakes are reported faster than with scientific tools. However, for many people, the “wart and all” nature of Twitter posts is starting to look like a bug, rather than a feature.
Would an edit button change Twitter’s unique branding? There could be ways to improve this, such as allowing editing only for a short time after posting, but certainly the company has to consider.
More generally, the design of media platforms shapes the type of discussion that takes place on them.
The presence of “like” and “retweet” buttons on Twitter encourages users to create content that attracts others to click these buttons and make their content go viral even more. This, in turn, shapes the nature of the conversation happening on the platform.
Similarly, websites use algorithms and designs to “push” users in specific directions – such as buying a product.
There’s been a lot of research on the ways in which discourse is shaped by the design of social media platforms, which establishes that every “payoff” a user puts in affects conversation. end.
This means that beyond basic technological challenges, Twitter has to think about the possible unintended consequences of seemingly simple changes – even on the level of a modest edit button. The medium shapes the message, and Twitter has to think carefully about the kind of message it wants its platform to shape.
