Jane Manchun Wong, a reverse engineer, explains that editing a tweet with Twitter’s next edit button may leave a digital trail of your tweet history. Wong notes at TweetManchun that the editing tool appears to gain an “immutable” quality. When a tweet is modified, Twitter may produce a totally new tweet while keeping prior versions of that tweet.
Reportedly, Twitter is allegedly working on an edit button, which users including Tesla CEO Elon Musk have demanded, but the microblogging network will reportedly preserve a digital record of your previous tweets.
“It appears that Twitter’s approach to Update Tweet is immutable,” Wong said late Saturday. “Rather than changing the Tweet text within the same Tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the corrected content, along with a list of the old Tweets previous to that edit.”
I recorded a GIF from the upcoming #Twitter's Edit Button! pic.twitter.com/FPIRzzjUAF
— Nima Owji (@nima_owji) April 16, 2022
#Twitter is working on the edit button 👀 pic.twitter.com/684nQ5bhnF
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) April 15, 2022
It is unclear how users will see a tweet’s modification history. The edit option will initially be available only to Twitter Blue users, but it will eventually be made available to all users. Alessandro Paluzzi, an app researcher, also shared pictures of the new edit tool, demonstrating how the “Edit Tweet” feature may show in the three-dot list on the right-hand side of the tweets.
Earlier this week, Twitter said it is focusing on allowing users to edit their tweets after they have been sent to fix typos and mistakes. Twitter Blue subscribers will be among the first to try out the new feature in the “coming months,” according to the microblogging network.
“Now that everyone is asking, we’ve been working on an edit function since last year!” According to the company’s VP of consumer development, the edit button has long been the most requested Twitter feature, Jay Sullivan.