Elon Musk, Twitter's newly minted biggest shareholder and board member, posted a poll Monday asking whether users wanted the social network to add the option to edit tweets. (The poll options were "yse," currently leading with 73.6% of the vote, and "on.") Twitter on Monday announced that it actually is working on an edit option, though it cheekily added, "no, we didn’t get the idea from a poll." The Guardian reports Twitter users have for years pushed for an edit button so that typos, etc., can easily be corrected; currently, the only workaround is to delete the tweet entirely and repost. Twitter's CEO himself retweeted Musk's poll and urged users to "vote carefully," Fox Business reports.
Twitter said the idea has been in the works since last year and testing will start in the coming months. Not everyone thinks such an option should be available with no caveats, however. "Under two conditions," tweeted one person in response to Musk's poll. "It’s only available for a few minutes, 5-10 mins. And when an edit is made, there’s a small link that shows the edit. This keeps a public record but allows the tweeter the ability to fix a simple mistake and not re-notify their followers with a new tweet." Musk agreed that idea sounded "reasonable."
When someone else expressed concern that a tweet could go viral and then the meaning could be completely changed by the author afterward, the CTO of Meta replied, "We solved this on Facebook a long time ago. You just include an indicator that it has been edited along with a change log. If you are really worried about embeds they can point to a specific revision in that history but with a link to the latest edit. Not a real issue." Musk, however, said only, "Facebook gives me the willies." (More Elon Musk stories.)
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