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The social media company tweeted the news, saying it has been working on the feature since last year.
After years of debate about the possibility of an edit button, Twitter has confirmed that it is working on the long-awaited feature.
The company said it will begin testing with Twitter Blue – it’s paid subscription user base – in the coming months.
The news comes hot on the heels of tech entrepreneur Elon Musk taking a major stake in the social media company and joining its board.
Yesterday (5 April), the Tesla boss posted a Twitter poll asking his 80m followers if the platform should introduce an edit button.
However, the company tweeted later in the day that it has been working on an edit button since last year and suggested that it didn’t get the idea from Musk’s poll.
now that everyone is asking…
yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year!
no, we didn’t get the idea from a poll 😉
we're kicking off testing within @TwitterBlue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible.
— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) April 5, 2022
Twitter also said it was working on the edit button in a tweet posted on 1 April, which was presumed to be an April Fool’s joke by many users.
The news may come as a surprise to many, as the company has famously batted away any hope of an edit button in recent years.
In 2019, senior Twitter executive Kayvon Beykpour said it was “nowhere near the top of our priorities”.
In an interview with Wired in 2020, company co-founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey spoke at length about why there was no edit button and why there was unlikely to be one in the future.
“The reason there’s no edit button [and] there hasn’t been an edit button traditionally is we started as an SMS text messaging service,” he said. “So as you all know, when you send a text, you can’t really take it back. We wanted to preserve that vibe and that feeling in the early days.”
Dorsey, who has since stepped down as CEO, had also previously explained that one of the major concerns with an edit button was that it could be used to distort an original tweet’s meaning, which would be especially tricky when factoring in retweets.
Dorsey will remain on the social media company’s board until his term ends next month.
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