It may be a detail for you, but for Twitter users it matters a lot: the famous social network announced on Tuesday that it was working on a button to edit a message in the event of a spelling mistake or other error. “Since everyone is asking… Yes, we’ve been working on an editing feature since last year!” “tweeted the communication account of the Californian company.
The new button will first be tested by subscribers to Twitter Blue, a premium service that gives certain privileges for $3 per month, such as the option to un-tweet. The platform thus wants to determine “what works, what does not work and what is possible”, she specified. It’s “the most requested option in years,” Jay Sullivan, a Twitter user product manager, said on Tuesday.
Testing will take time
Since the beginnings of Twitter, its users have been calling for a tool of this type, to correct messages composed and sent too quickly. But this small revolution could change the uses of Twitter, a sort of real-time archive of everyone’s public statements – and slippages.
Thus, Jay Sullivan warned that the tests would take “time”, because such a button could “be used to modify the archives of a public conversation”, unless there are safeguards like “limits in time, controls and transparency on what has been changed”. Right now people are deleting and re-tweeting (if wrong),” he added to his account.
“No, we did not have this idea thanks to a poll”, also joked the communication team on Tuesday, in reference to the new member of its board of directors, the billionaire Elon Musk, fond of the polls on his account. Twitter with tens of millions of subscribers.
The boss of Tesla has become the largest shareholder of Twitter by taking a 9.2% stake in the capital, announced on Monday. He then asked if users wanted an “edit” button. Nearly 4.4 million people voted, and about 73% answered “yes”.
“We considered the practicalities (of an edit button), but we probably never will,” Twitter founder Jack Dorsey said in an interview with Wired magazine in January 2021. He ceded the general manager position at Parag Agrawal last November.