During a talk at the Indian Institute of Technology, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has said that the company is considering adding the option to edit Tweets, but Twitter ‘has to carefully consider use cases for the edit button before making it a reality’.
Users have been wanting an edit button for Tweets for some time in order to correct things like spelling mistakes, incorrect URLs or attachments, something that Mr Dorsey said ‘a lot more achievable than allowing people to edit any tweet all the way back in time’.
The option to edit Tweets would be limited though with Mr Dorsey pointing out that ‘anyone could abuse the feature to alter their controversial or damning statements later on’. It’s for this reason that it has become somewhat of a trend in tech to delete your Twitter timeline, with the likes of celebrities such as Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2 director James Gunn fired from the third movie for Tweets made several years ago.
Editing Tweets however doesn’t appear to be something that’s coming soon. Twitter has been addressing this feature request for many years, with Dorsey addressing the controversy as far back as 2016 when he first said the company ‘has been thinking a lot’ about adding an edit button for Tweets, though as The Next Web points out – nothing came of this.
At this latest talk, Dorsey said ‘We have been considering this for a while and we have to do in the right way. We can’t just rush it out. We can’t make something which is distracting or takes anything away from the public record’.
There’s growing support for the ability to edit tweets, the question is how long will it really take, and will it finally happen now?
