Musk considers Twitter edit button
Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO and power Twitter user who is now Twitter's largest shareholder and newly appointed board member, may have thoughts on a long-standing request from users: Should there be an edit button?
On Monday evening, Musk launched a Twitter poll about whether they want an edit button, cheekily misspelling “yes” as “yse” and “no” as “on.” More than 3 million people had voted as of Tuesday morning.
Twitter's CEO, Parag Agrawal, retweeted the poll with a seeming reference to an earlier tweet by Musk, saying “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.” Musk had used the same language in a March tweet describing another one of his polls that asked whether Twitter adheres to free speech principles.
Twitter spokesperson Catherine Hill declined to comment on whether Agrawal was joking, and did not answer whether Twitter would follow the results of Musk's poll.
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had said that Twitter had considered an edit button, but in a January 2020 Q&A maintained that “we'll probably never do it.” He cited wanting to keep the spirit of Twitter's text-message origins – texts can't be edited – and the confusion that could result from users changing to a tweet that has been circulated by others. Dorsey stepped down as CEO in November 2021.
For what it's worth, the chief technology officer of Facebook owner Meta, Andrew Bosworth, tweeted Monday that big changes to posts that have already gone viral were not an issue. (Facebook lets you edit posts.) “You just include an indicator that it has been edited along with a change log,” he wrote.
Musk's response: “Facebook gives me the willies.”
But other people say adding an edit button would change the nature of Twitter, making it less valuable as a historical warehouse that stores official statements by politicians and other high-profile people. Twitter, for better or worse, “has become the de facto news wire,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University communications professor.
Tweets are often embedded in news stories, which could cause problems if the users edit important or controversial tweets without leaving evidence of the original statement. Grygiel suggested instead giving Twitter users a window of time to edit their tweets before they publish them.