Elon Musk, who recently became Twitter’s largest shareholder, posted a poll on the site asking users if they wanted an edit button. His choices are misspelled “yse” and “on”, which might make you think the whole thing was a joke until you see that the poll has already been polled. retweeted by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. “The consequences of this poll will be important. Vote carefully,” Agrawal wrote, hinting that the poll could lead to an actual edit button on the social network.
Many Twitter users have requested the edit button over the years, but the site has staunchly resisted those requests. In one Q&A video with Wired back in 2020, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey said the site “probably never will” add an edit button. He explains that the social network started as a text messaging service and that you can’t get a message back once you’ve sent it. Twitter seems to want to maintain that vibe and emotion.
Musk, who was once a prolific tweeter before he bought the 9.2% social network, which could serve as a catalyst for the company to change that perspective. As of this writing, 74.7 percent of the 1,439,779 accounts that participated in the poll voted “yse” for an edit button. Whether Twitter will immediately start working on the feature or not if the winning “yse” remains to be seen. That is, if it hasn’t started developing it yet – official Twitter account recently posted that the company is “working on an edit button,” but that’s on April Fools’ Day.
It’s also unclear how the edit button will work on Twitter, where reposting other people’s content is widely practiced. If the person who tweeted the original post edited it, will the re-tweeted content reflect the change? And will the edit button for a tweet be available indefinitely or only for a short period of time? Dorsey said in Wired interviewed that Twitter had previously considered giving users 30 to 60 seconds to fix something, which would be more than enough time to correct typos and other minor changes.
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