Twitter edit button becomes a reality for some – 'coming soon' to the US
Twitter edit button becomes a reality for some – 'coming soon' to the US
You'll need Twitter Blue and be in Canada, Australia and New Zealand to test out the edit button today
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Twitter edit button
✏️ Twitter edit button is live for the first time – for select users
🗺️ Available in 🇨🇦 Canada, 🇦🇺 Australia, 🇳🇿 New Zealand; 🇺🇸US “soon”
🐦 You’ll need to pay for Twitter Blue ($4.99/mo) for this beta feature
⏲️ You’ll have 30 minutes to edit a tweet
🧻 There’s a paper trail showing the version history
The long-requested Twitter edit button became a reality today, October 3, at least if you are located in Canada, Australia or New Zealand and are subscribed to the social media site’s paid Twitter Blue service.
“US coming soon” teased today’s Twitter announcement, meaning those paying the $4.99/mo fee (up from $2.99/mo to $4.99/mo as of July 29) in the United States won’t see an edit button just yet. There’s a very good chance that Twitter is beta testing the edit button in select countries before rolling it out to the rest of the English-speaking world and then expanding to other languages from there.
Consider this a beta (select countries) of a beta (one language so far) of a beta (Twitter Blue users only at first).
How the Twitter edit button will work
When the Twitter edit button turns on, you’ll have 30 minutes to edit a tweet – and each time you compose and send a new tweet, a message will pop up at the top of your device reminding you of the edit ability and the time limit.
From there, you’ll be able to go to the currently live tweet, hit the three dots menu button and select “Edit Tweet” right below “Delete Tweet.” You can edit the tweet and hit update to make changes live to everyone else.
I would have loved an edit button during the height of my PS5 restock and Xbox Series X price tracking phase. Redoing a tweet with a dead URL or rephrasing a tweet where people got the wrong idea (i.e. something that didn’t go in stock when it should have) without deleting it and sacrificing engagement would have been a big plus for me. Here’s to hoping an edit button debuts before things ramp up again during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
How to know if a tweet has been edited
Of course, there’s a very necessary paper trail for all edited tweets. A pencil icon will appear next to the timestamp of any edited tweet. Clicking this will reveal a version history of the tweet. It seems like a much better way of reviewing someone’s tweets vs looking for screenshotting of those deleted messages.
This is what has held up the development of edited tweets for so long, I’ve been told over the years from people working at Twitter. Transparency on such a volatile social media platform where people read and react made it difficult to push through the idea of being able to edit tweets. Even now, the pencil icon may fly over people’s heads before they read and view replies (with those replies being to a prior tweet version).
But the calls for an edit button to fix typos and reframe botched sentences have never ceased from users and on-again off-again Twitter owners. So here we are.
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