Apparently it wasn't just a April Fool's joke or an errant tweet from Elon Musk.
As any Twitter user knows, the dilemma over adding an edit button is the deepest ideological ravine of our time, and Twitter is about to change its stance from its previous manifestations.
The company confirmed that it is, in fact, working on a way to edit tweets. Twitter started playing with a tweet editing option last year and will test it on Twitter Blue Labs, a space in the platform's premium subscription product where you test new features. Twitter Blue subscribers can expect to see a tweet edit button "in the coming months," according to the company.
On Monday, news broke that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was buying a sizable 9,2% share of Twitter and thereby getting a board seat. In characteristic Musk fashion, the iconoclastic mega-billionaire emphasized an edit button in a tweet a day before the company opted to make an announcement through official channels.
Twitter has shown a somewhat novel willingness to shape the platform based on user feedback, so it will be interesting to see what happens when testing begins. It's easy to find strong opinions for or against tweet editing, but it's much harder to know at scale what most people really want. Some Twitter power users have been crying out for an edit tweet button for years, while others have serious misgivings about making misinformation and harassment even more difficult to manage on a social network still plagued by serious problems. .
In the past, the company downplayed its interest in giving users the ability to edit tweets, saying the feature was barely high on its priority list. But 2022 Twitter is a very different beast, bearing little resemblance to the stagnant social platform of yesteryear, and no longer led by CEO Jack Dorsey, who faced a major pressure from investors towards the end of his term to speed up the pace of business.
Although Dorsey is out, he picked up the pace. This newfound speed has applied it to all sorts of new products over the last couple of years, rapidly developing and sometimes scrapping new features as fast as they came. For example, Fleets, the experimental product of disappearing tweets, lasted less than a year after officially debuting in November 2020.
The company first launched its Twitter Blue premium monthly subscription service just under a year ago, and has generally been keen to see what cements itself within this user group in recent months. That includes everything from TikTok-like reaction videos and photographer-friendly images to ongoing policy changes that recast the platform's rules as a living document responding to global events.
