We can almost count the hours since Elon Musk’s arrival on Twitter, and it seems that the social network of the little bird is already revolutionized from the inside out. And, personally, I have seen an interesting sign that among those responsible for the social network, perhaps Musk’s ways are not doing too much fun. Something understandable, on the other hand, since we already know that the billionaire is quite given to verbal excesses.
The fact is that, as we told you yesterday, Musk published a survey on his Twitter account, asking users if they were for or against the social network adding a function to edit tweets. And of course, how could it be otherwise, the majority election, with 73.6% of more than 4.4 million votes, it was for him. And perhaps Musk’s query had to do with last Friday’s Twitter April Fools prank, when he posted a tweet stating precisely that, that they were preparing that feature.
Do you want an edit button?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022
What we could not expect on Friday, seeing the joke, but we could begin to speculate that it would become a reality from the Musk survey, has been confirmed today with a tweet from one of the official accounts of the social network, in which it is confirmed that Twitter is already working on the tweet editing function. And what’s more, the beta version of it She will be ready “in the coming months” and it will debut, as we could already imagine, in its labs function, exclusive to Twitter Blue users.
Something that has caught my attention, yes, and the reason why I say that Musk’s verbal excesses might not be too funny on Twitter, is the third paragraph, a single line, that you can see in the official message confirmation: “No, we didn’t get the idea from a poll 😉”. A clear and obvious allusion to the survey of the company’s new shareholder, and which makes it clear that if this function is being tested and will be released soon, it is not because of Musk’s tweet.
Mark the ground? Prevent friend Elon from scoring a point that he doesn’t deserve? I don’t know, but it certainly doesn’t seem like a particularly friendly reaction..
now that everyone is asking…
yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year!
no, we didn’t get the idea from a poll 😉
we’re kicking off testing within @TwitterBlue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible.
—Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) April 5, 2022
Be that as it may, now the important thing is to see under what conditions that function is deployed. And it is that, although it is widely demanded, and many users affirm that it is to be able to carry out minor corrections, such as typos and misspellings, the truth is that it can be used for much more malicious purposes, such as completely modifying the meaning of a message once it has achieved a certain amount of virality.
So I personally understand that the feature should be limited to minor fixes (of a few characters), that the social network must clearly identify that the tweet has been edited (and ideally it would allow the original message to be viewed without editing), and that all users who have “Liked” and/or have retweeted the original, they receive a notification warning them of the change, in case they want to reverse those actions.
