Twitter Confirms It’s Testing Edit Button, Says Idea Doesn’t ‘Come From a Poll’

The Twitter logo is displayed on the screen of a smartphone and a tablet in Toulouse, southern France on Oct. 26, 2020. Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images

Twitter is testing an edit button, the social media giant said on Tuesday.

The company said in a tweet on Tuesday that it had the long sought after feature had been in the works for a considerable length of time. Twitter users currently delete and repost tweets if they wish to amend typos or errors.

“We’ve been working on an edit feature since last year,” the company said later via its Twitter Comms account, noting that it would soon test out the new feature with a select group of users who have signed up for Twitter’s subscription product, Twitter Blue.

Members of Twitter Blue are granted exclusive access to premium features and app customizations and pay a monthly fee.

Twitter also posted a short video showing that its edit button may feature with other options for tweets, such as “delete tweet” “pin to profile”, “change who can reply”, and “add/remove from lists”. It isn’t clear whether the clip represents the company’s final product.

Jay Sullivan, Twitter’s vice president of consumer product, said in a tweet that an edit button was the most requested change that the company has had for years.

“People want to be able to fix (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes, typos and hot takes in the moment. They currently work around this by deleting and tweeting again,” he wrote.

“Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation. Protecting the integrity of that public conversation is our top priority when we approach this work,” said Sullivan.

Twitter intended to “approach this feature with care and thoughtfulness and we will share updates as we go,” he continued.

“This is just one feature we are exploring as we work to give people more choice and control over their Twitter experience, foster a healthy conversation, and help people be more comfortable on Twitter. These are the things that motivate us every day,” Sullivan added.

Twitter said that it didn’t get the idea of rolling out an edit button from a poll.

On Monday, shortly after becoming the social media giant’s biggest individual shareholder, Tesla CEO Elon Musk created a Twitter poll asking users if they want an edit button on the platform.

“Do you want an edit button?” he asked the Twittersphere.

The final results of the poll show that more than 73 percent of users are in favor of an edit button being rolled out on the platform.

In 2019, Twitter’s product lead Kayvon Beykpour said that an edit button was a feature “I think we should build at some point, but it’s not anywhere near the top of our priorities.”

In January 2020, the platform’s founder, Jack Dorsey, told Wired that Twitter would “probably never” roll out an edit button, saying that Twitter began in 2006 as a text message service, and that “we wanted to preserve that vibe” that “when you send a text, you can’t really take it back.”