That Twitter will soon have the tweet editing function is something that just a few weeks ago would have sounded like science fiction, or even a joke, since the social network itself joked about it last April Fools’ Day. And yet finally the company clarified that they were working on it, and they also took care to clarify that the survey published by Elon Musk had nothing to do with it, that they had already been working on this function for quite some time.
In confirming that the feature is already on the way, we’ve learned that will debut, in test mode, with Twitter Blue users, so even when we can start to see it, it is possible that changes will occur later, based on the learning from the testing phase. In other words, although we will know more about its operation than we do now, but we will still have to wait to know its final form and operation.
Be that as it may, we’re already starting to get some insight into it, and in this case we owe it to Jane Manchun Wong, who has already revealed a lot of interesting Twitter insights to us in the past. And it is that, in a tweetanticipates that Twitter would keep the history of modifications of tweetsand that it would also do so with a system specially designed to guarantee the persistence of revisions: creating a new tweet entity for each edition.
Looks like Twitter’s approach to Edit Tweet is immutable, as in, instead of mutating the Tweet text within the same Tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the amended content, along with the list of the old Tweets prior to that edit
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) April 16, 2022
In this way, and while waiting to see how they would be displayed, Twitter will not allow the content of a message with an associated ID to be modified. Instead, the edited text will be published in a new tweet which, yes, will be linked to the previous one as a reference that it is an edition of that one. A system that seems quite logical, since it would allow a virtually infinite number of corrections, which would be saved independently as messages, but would be concatenated.
The doubt, of course, is whether the creators of the corrected tweets will somehow have access to any of those messages and thus the ability to erase an original but keep the correction. It also raises the question of whether all the interactions of the original tweet will also apply to the corrected version of the message. And it is that only if the first is guaranteed, would it make sense to apply the second. Otherwise, I can already imagine a legion of manipulators making plans about it.
