How to Finally Edit Your Tweets
As long as Twitter has existed, there have been tweets that needed a second chance. Twitter users have been begging the company for years to implement an editing feature, but Twitter rarely makes drastic changes to its platform — with a few notable exceptions, including a 280-character limit and choosing who will reply to your tweets. No matter how many users complained, Twitter still hasn’t budged. It seems like after 15 years of blogging with our every thought, the edit button is finally a reality.
Twitter posted the news in a random tweet Thursday morning as if it meant nothing. “Oh, is it ? Ha, it’s really just another Thursday here at old Twitter HQ.” If Twitter ever discovers something important, like life on Mars or a cure for cancer, I expect the news to be delivered that way.
Despite Snark, an edit button will appear. Soon, Twitter users everywhere will be able to tweet, see their mistake, and fix it without destroying the original copy or starting from scratch.
The edit button is a Twitter Blue exclusive (for now).
Twitter is still testing the edit button, so it’s not a full-fledged feature ready for mass use. Thus, Twitter chooses two pools of users to solve problems: Twitter employees and Twitter Blue subscribers.
Starting this month, those of us paying $4.99 a month for advanced Twitter features can add an edit button to our arsenal. The rest of us free folks will just have to wait and see the modified tweets from Blue users.
How tweet editing works
When you get access to the Twitter edit button, whether it’s Twitter Blue Early Access or a possible public rollout of the feature, here’s what you can expect.
Whenever you post a tweet, you have 30 minutes to edit it as many times as you want. You can select an edit option to start editing and then publish it. Once those 30 minutes are up, you’re done. Your tweet is available with edits and everything and cannot be changed. Your only recourse is the same as always: deletion.
However, keep in mind that each edit is saved in the edit history, which is visible to anyone who has access to your tweets. You don’t hide mistakes or annoying thoughts by editing them. Each iteration of your tweet remains as long as your tweet and can be viewed with an explicit edit mark. If you’ve tweeted something controversial, the edit button won’t save you. However, for fixing quick typos or expanding your original idea a bit, this is a welcome addition.
However, I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how amazingly creative Twitter users are going to turn this system into a meme machine.