Soon, the days of deleting Tweets after noticing a typo or second-guessing a late-night sentiment will be over — Twitter is finally rolling out a long-anticipated edit feature, the company announced Thursday.
Tests have already begun internally for Twitter employees, and editing is expected to roll out to paid Twitter Blue subscribers by the end of the month.
Twitter Blue users pay $4.99 per month for access to premium features on the platform.
The company cheekily posted to its own platform to let users know that the change was rolling out.
if you see an edited Tweet it’s because we’re testing the edit button
this is happening and you’ll be okay
— Twitter (@Twitter) September 1, 2022
Users will have a 30-minute period after a Tweet is sent to edit their tweet via an “edit” icon on the published post. Edited tweets will be labeled with a label and timestamp to indicate that a Tweet has been edited, and clicking that label will bring up the Tweets edit history.
So even though the new Tweet will appear on users’ feeds, the original unedited Tweet will still be accessible.
The rollout of the edit button will put Twitter among the ranks of other social media giants like Facebook and Instagram which have long offered edit features for posts and captions.
“Given that this is our most requested feature to date, we wanted to both update you on our progress and give you a heads up that, even if you’re not in a test group, everyone will still be able to see if a Tweet has been edited,” the company clarified in a blog post.
On April 1, Twitter announced that it was testing an edit feature.
Elon Musk, who is currently in a war with Twitter over his attempt to back out of his $44 billion bid to purchase the company, polled his followers three days later about whether or not they thought that Twitter should have an edit button. Overwhelmingly, nearly 74% said answered yes.
Musk formally made his bid 21 days later.
Thursday’s announcement brought in mixed feelings among Twitter users, many expressing worry that the feature would “ruin” Twitter and its permanence.
The simplest way to prevent abuse of a Twitter edit button is to reset all retweets and likes to zero whenever a tweet is edited. That way, no one can tweet something, go viral, then change the message. Doesn’t sound like Twitter’s test version does this, which is baffling!
— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) September 1, 2022
Twitter has long had a superior edit button called “delete” which allows you to remove a bad tweet and repost a better one without anyone being confused about what happened.
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) September 1, 2022
Edit button on twitter will literally ruin its legacy. People can easily manipulate their old and problematic tweets and wash their sins.
— ` (@FourOverthrows) September 1, 2022
Not having an edit button is what makes Twitter special and tweets reliable.
— Hybee (@DearyHybee) September 1, 2022
Twitter didn’t specify when the feature would roll out to all users, but maintained that the company would “expand” as it studies the results of the initial rollout to “learn and observe how people use Edit Tweet.”
Twitter was down over 41% year over year as of Thursday afternoon.