Advertisement
Advertisement
X (formerly Twitter)
Get more with myNEWS
A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you
Learn more
Twitter announced that it will soon start testing an edit button at its monthly subscription service. Photo: AFP/File

Twitter finally launches an edit button for paying subscribers, months after Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s poll

  • Edit Tweet, as the feature will be called, will let users make changes to their tweet for up to 30 minutes after it’s originally published
  • The feature will soon be available to users who pay US$4.99 per month for a subscription to Twitter Blue
Twitter Inc. is launching an edit button for the first time, after years of debate both internally and externally as to whether such a feature was a good idea for a product known for making posts go viral.

The edit feature will soon be available to users who pay US$4.99 per month for a subscription to Twitter Blue.

Edit Tweet, as the feature will be called, will let users make changes to their tweet for up to 30 minutes after it’s originally published. Tweets that are edited will carry a label, and others on Twitter will be able to click on the label to see prior versions of the post.

The company is specifically testing the edit button with a small group of users in hopes of quickly resolving possible issues, the company wrote in a blog post. The edit button will then roll out to Twitter Blue users in the coming weeks.

Twitter has experimented with versions of an edit button. Subscribers of Twitter Blue, currently have access to a feature that holds tweets for up to one minute, allowing users to review the tweet and “undo” it before the post is published.

Twitter has debated the pros and cons of an edit button for years, with some worried that it will be abused by people hoping to go viral, only to change the content of a message after it’s been retweeted.

Former CEO Jack Dorsey said as recently as January 2020 that an edit button was highly unlikely, but it was so widely requested that the company never made a definitive call on whether it would launch something.

That debate snowballed earlier this year when Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk took a large ownership stake in the company, then polled his followers on whether they wanted an edit button. Most those who voted said yes.

Twitter quickly confirmed it was already testing the feature internally, and in an apparent effort to distance the project from Musk’s influence, clarified that it started work on an edit button before Musk’s poll.

Additional reporting by Bloomberg

Post