A Twitter “edit button” may be on the horizon.
Last Friday, the social media giant fired off a tweet claiming its team was working on the highly requested feature. Though many users dismissed the post as an apparent April Fool’s joke, Twitter confirmed Tuesday the announcement wasn’t a prank.
According to Twitter’s communications account, the company has been working on an edit button since 2021, and plans to begin the testing phase later this year. The platform said the feature will be introduced to Twitter Blue subscribers in the upcoming months; the team will then determine “what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible.”
Twitter also clarified that the decision was not based on poll results—an apparent reference to a post shared by Elon Musk, who recently joined Twitter’s board of directors after purchasing a 9.2 percent stake in the company.
Users have been asking for an edit feature over the last several years, arguing there needed to be a faster and easier way to correct accidental errors. But despite the growing calls, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey previously indicated that an edit button would probably never roll out.
“We started as an SMS, text messaging service. And as you all know, when you send a text, you can’t really take it back,” he said in a 2020 video for Wired. “We wanted to preserve that vibe, that feeling, in the early days.”
Dorsey went on to highlight some of the issues an edit button might cause, such as a tweet’s content being altered after they were widely shared.
“One is you might send a tweet, and then someone might retweet that, and then an hour later, you completely change the content of that tweet,” he explained, “and that person that retweeted the original tweet, is now retweeting and rebroadcasting a tweet that’s completely different [...] So, these are all the considerations. But we’ll probably never do it.”
