Day after Musk’s poll, Twitter says work for ‘edit’ button going on since 2021

Twitter will soon begin internal testing of a long-awaited edit button feature, the microblogging site announced on Tuesday. It also announced that work for the same is already underway since 2021.

Twitter also posted an animation showing how the feature would work as it made the announcement on its site.

This came a day after Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, who recently acquired 9.1% stake in the company making him the biggest shareholder of the company, started a poll asking users if they want an edit button. The results showed that 73.6% out of about 4.4 million respondents said they supported the feature.

‘No, we didn’t get the idea from a poll,’ the company also clarified in the post.

Twitter’s head of consumer product Jay Sullivan said the company would seek “input and adversarial thinking” ahead of a launch of an “edit” feature. He also said that the feature will take time to fine-tune as “without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation”.

The feature will be first tested on its subscription-based service– Blue Labs — in the coming months to “learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible,” the company also said.

On Twitter Blue, subscribed members get exclusive access to premium features and app customizations for a monthly subscription. The service was launched in June 2021. The extra features available on the paid platform include an undo facility that allows users to set a time delay before tweets are published, thus enabling them to edit and correct content before it is made public.