Garth Moore

Earlier this month, CEO Jack Dorsey suggested that Twitter could roll out an edit function for individual tweets. As this news made the rounds, it was met with predictably mixed opinions. When Twitter announced that they were expanding from 140 to 280 characters back in 2017, I was one who had misgivings. I said it would hurt their brand and make a mess of the platform. I was happily wrong, as the expanded character count and threads have made Twitter much more lively, informative, and entertaining (and none more so lately than Quinn Cummings yarn about her hilarious boss and the Academy Awards).

So what to make of an edit feature for Twitter?

For any frequent user of the platform, this would be a useful feature. I can’t count how many times I’ve deleted and then re-posted tweets due to a typo or incorrect link. This becomes a problem as engagements start to tally up for a tweet. You have to be quick about it because once you start getting views, retweets, or likes, you’re a bit screwed. So there sits your tweet: stuffed with a lot of engagement and a typo staring at you for eternity.

But I understand why Twitter is reticent (even though other platforms have solved this issue). Tweets being edited can change their original intent, for both good and bad. If a person tweets something incendiary, fires up their base, then edits the tweet to be less malignant, then we would have to depend on a random screen grab of the original tweet to hold that person accountable. And even if it’s not done maliciously, RT’ing a tweet that has been edited can be confusing for how a message spreads in the Twitterverse. These reasons, along with sloppiness and confusion, has been argued about for years.

Dorsey says Twitter needs to roll out this feature the right way, examining all use cases. Twitter is thinking about a number of new ideas (doing away with the Like button, bringing back a chronological feed). Since I was against the 140-character feature, I will wholeheartedly through my support for an edit feature. An edit feature will help content creators quickly correct mistakes without losing engagement, and as long as the edit history is preserved (even with a parenthetical edited next to the tweet timestamp), some accountability would partially be intact. There are malicious actors on Twitter, but a Twitter feature won’t deter these people (bots) anyway.

Let’s see if Twitter rolls the dice on this feature soon. Hopefully, we’ll see an unedited tweet from Jack about it soon.