Twitter’s upcoming ‘edit’ feature will retain a copy of the original tweet
It will keep track of the tweet history and retain all previous versions

Irrespective of the changes Elon Musk wants to bring to Twitter, the social media company has confirmed that an edit button is in the works. The giant mentioned that they would start off with Twitter Blue subscribers initially, rolling it out widely later on.

Jane Manchun Wong, creator and developer at Twitter, said that the platform’s approach to the option is ‘immutable.’ This is because the feature would essentially retain a copy of the original tweet, with a thread of older conversations. At the time of editing a tweet, the feature would copy the user’s text into a new tweet. Along with it, this new tweet would come with the ‘amended content.’

Currently, the edit button is not yet available for testing for any user of the social media platform. However, some developers managed to gain premature access of this new option, sharing screenshots of the feature online. Visibly, the option to edit comes up on the three-dots menu, clicking on which would talk the user to a composition page. It appears quite like the window of a regular tweet composer, but now it is already filled with original text, with ‘update’ at the bottom.

#Twitter is working on the edit button 👀 pic.twitter.com/684nQ5bhnF

— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) April 15, 2022

How would the tweet history appear to users if visible:

According to Manchun Wong, it is still not clear as to how the tweet’s edit history would appear to the users or any other ways. However, in case Twitter opts to make the history public, it would contribute towards addressing certain concerns over potential abuse of this option. This is as some critics assume that it could be used to change public record and mislead networkers.

The company has not yet confirmed the existence of tweet history tracker. Spokesperson Anna Hubatsch mentioned that Twitter did not have anything to share beyond the content in the tweet from @TwitterComms and a tweet from @JaySullivan. 

Twitter initially announced its plans about the coveted edit button earlier this month, after what looked like a joke about it on April Fool’s Day. However, just prior to the official confirmation from the social media company, Musk posted a poll on a tweet about an edit button. This was just following his disclosure of purchasing a 9.2% stake in Twitter. Clearly, a wave of incidents have taken place since then, from his refusal to join the board to offering to buy the entire company.