Twitter has confirmed it's engaged on the long-awaited edit function that customers have been requesting for years now.
And apparently, it hasn’t come because of board member Elon Musk’s current ballot.
The social media big confirmed the information in a tweet, explaining that it’s been engaged on the choice to edit tweets ‘since final yr’.
Initially, the thought was punted as an April Fools’ joke, however then – in a short time – issues bought a bit extra severe.
It emerged that Musk had purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter for $3 billion (£2.3 billion), making him the corporate’s largest shareholder.
He then polled his 80 million followers about an edit button.
His ballot was highlighted by Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal and, up to now, over 73% of the three million respondants mentioned they needed the edit button.
Twitter adopted it up with the official announcement, saying it might be testing the function for a subset of its customers. Together with a gif exhibiting how it might work.
At current, solely Twitter Blue subscribers will get entry to the edit button and the corporate says it is going to ‘study what works, what doesn’t, and what’s doable’ earlier than making it broadly accessible.
What are the drawbacks?
The edit button could also be one thing that customers have clamoured for for years, however is it actually such a good suggestion?
Not everyone seems to be satisfied.
Critics have identified having the ability to edit tweets may pose issues if nefarious sorts benefit from it.
For instance, what if an innocuous tweet goes viral solely to have the unique poster retroactively edit it to comprise misinformation. It could then seem that everybody who retweeted it agreed with no matter it contained after the edit.
The mythbusting website Snopes already highlighted a case the place cryptocurrency scammers created a faux Fb profile below the identify of an actual economist. They took older posts from the final 10 years and edited them to help their rip-off.
This explicit rip-off was additionally highlighted as being doable on Twitter if an edit button was launched.
Equally, we additionally don’t understand how an edit button would work if politicians, economics, celebrities or lecturers (or journalists) determined to return and re-edit their tweets following unfavourable reactions.
Likewise, if an account was compromised, what’s to cease hackers going again and sneakily enhancing earlier tweets to make it seem just like the account proprietor mentioned one thing they by no means meant.
It’s not but clear how Twitter will implement the choice. Will, for instance, edited tweets present that they’ve been edited – the identical method as Slack messages do? Or will it seem as if the tweet was all the time proven that method?
Both method, it appears just like the Twitter edit button will ultimately turn out to be a actuality – though Twitter promised it might by no means add it. Do you suppose it’s a good suggestion? Tell us under.
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