Most people who use Twitter have had the experience: you start a quick tweet, realize it has a typo, and get annoyed that you can’t click “edit” to correct it. Twitter users have been clamoring for an edit button for years.
Elon Musk, who recently bought up shares in the microblogging platform and made a bid of $48 billion (about Rs. 3,67,080 crore) for the entire company, asked his 82 million followers if they wanted an edit button. His (very unscientific) poll drew 4.4 million responses, 73 percent in favour.
On other social media platforms, you can edit posts after you’ve sent them. Looks like it would be an easy feature to add – so why isn’t Twitter doing it? Well, maybe it’s finally here. Independent of Musk’s poll, Twitter has confirmed that an edit button may be in the works. Enterprising users have even dug up some hints as to what it might look like.
So what’s the fuss about? Why is Twitter so opposed to an edit button? The answer could be that it is not as simple as it seems.
The first thing to know about tweets is that unlike posts on many other platforms, there is basically no way for Twitter to pull them back after they’ve been sent. The reason is that Twitter has a so-called Application Programming Interface (or API) that allows third parties, such as other apps or researchers, to download tweets in real time.
That is the power of Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, TweetBot, Twitteriffic and Echofon, which together account for about 6 million users.
Once third parties have downloaded tweets, there is no way for Twitter to get them back or edit them. It’s a bit like an email: once I’ve sent it and you’ve downloaded it, I can’t delete it from your computer.
If a user were to edit a tweet, the best thing Twitter would do is to send a message saying “please edit this tweet” – but the third party can choose whether or not to actually do it. (This is currently what happens when tweets are “deleted”.) Cats and dogs More importantly, an edit button can have unintended consequences and can be used as a weapon.
Consider this. Me, a cat lover, decides to tweet “I love cats!” Then you, who are also a cat lover (because why wouldn’t you), decide to quote my tweet and agree: “Me too!” (Remember when Twitter was so innocent?) What happens if I edit my original tweet to declare “I love dogs”? You are now being misrepresented as a dog lover, and when your cat-loving friends see this (which they will if I reply to your tweet and name them all), they disown you.
Yes, this is contrived, but it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the edit button can be used this way, especially by things like bot armies. Will Twitter users be happy to trade this capability for the convenience of correcting typos in their tweets? Warts and all: a bug or a feature? Twitter has built its reputation as the most “real-time” of the social media platforms — the place where earthquakes are reported faster than scientific instruments. However, for many people, the nature of Twitter posts is starting to look like a bug rather than a feature.
Will an edit button change Twitter’s unique brand? There may be ways to improve on this, such as only allowing edits within a short amount of time after posting, but it’s definitely a consideration for the company.
More generally, the design of media platforms determines the type of discussion that takes place about them.
The presence of the “Like” and “Retweet” buttons on Twitter encourages users to create content that will entice others to click these buttons, and further distribute their content. This in turn determines the nature of the conversation that takes place on the platform.
Similarly, websites use algorithms and designs to “push” users in certain directions, for example to buy a product.
There has been a rich body of research on how discourse is shaped by the design of social media platforms, showing that every “affordability” a user gets affects the conversation that ultimately takes place.
This means that, in addition to fundamental technological challenges, Twitter needs to think about the potential unintended consequences of seemingly simple changes — even down to the level of a simple edit button. The medium shapes the message and Twitter needs to think carefully about what kind of messages they want their platform to shape.
