By Nilanjan Dey
After a very long time, Twitter will start testing the highly requested edit button for its tweets. Currently, the feature will be provided to only the paid subscribers in the coming weeks.
The microblogging platform has been on the flak for a long time for not having an edit button and users have asked for this feature many times. Those requests became internet jokes that Twitter would instead produce anything else before providing the users with the number one requested feature.
Tweets will soon be able to be edited “a few times” within 30 minutes of publication for Twitter Blue subscribers who pay $4.99 a month, according to a blog post from Twitter.
While the microblogging site has received some attention for introducing this feature, it is not a novel concept. Other social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Pinterest, already allow users to edit posts to correct typos or add something that users missed.
Even Elon Musk, who is currently fighting Twitter in court to back out of the $44 billion deal, polled Twitter users on whether they wanted an edit button or not. This question was posed shortly after Musk announced his 9% stake in Twitter.
The question of whether allowing for the editing of tweets by users has generated discussion on Twitter and among its watchers.
Edited tweets will display a timestamp and an icon to indicate when they were last edited. The user will then be able to check the edit history and previous versions of the post by clicking on a label that will be present on the edited tweet.
Twitter has experimented with several iterations of an edit button. Twitter Blue, the company’s paid subscription service, gives users access to a feature that saves tweets for up to one minute so they can review and “undo” them before they are sent.
When a Twitter spokesperson was asked if this feature would be available to all users, she responded that the platform was testing the feature to see what would happen if it was made available to everyone.
