Twitter’s edit button is reportedly live, but it’s not going to work the way you’d think

There’s been a lot of chatter about Twitter getting the long-requested edit button, especially after Elon Musk bought 9.2 per cent of the platform’s shares and became the single largest individual stakeholder. Musk, in his typical style, also posted a meme about Twitter’s edit button.

Of course, there is a whole world of debate about why Twitter should get an edit button and also why it should not. But it appears that the button/feature is already live.

However, this is not going to work how you’d been expecting - Twitter is not going to let you destroy older tweets by editing them. What it actually is going to do is create an audit trail. And in a way that makes sense.

The beat code for the edit feature has started popping up for some users though it is not functional for most. While the rest of us wait to try it out, there are certain crucial things one can learn from what is already visible.

According to Jane Manchun Wong, Twitter is going to manage edited tweets. It is not going to directly let users edit and republish a tweet but instead it is going to create a new tweet with a new ID and keep the record of the older tweet along with it in a list. So, you won’t be exactly editing a tweet, you are creating a new one.

Wong told TechRadar that she saw this “in the code” and was “describing the approach based on it”.

Most people would have assumed that an edit button/feature on Twitter would mean older tweets being wiped off entirely, but that’s not what Twitter has planned. If this is indeed what the platform wants, “it's probably the best and most historically accurate approach in that no one can simply edit a tweet and act as if the original tweet didn't happen (unless they delete it),” as TechRadar points out.

The Edit option has started appearing sporadically for some accounts, for 9to5Google contributor Dylan Roussel, the option showed up in the list of options under each tweet’s ellipses.

The option showed up with the ‘Edit Tweet’ label with a pencil icon. However, for Roussel, the feature did not work. Once it is made available to more people, there will be more clarity about how exactly this is going to work. Twitter had mentioned that it was going to start testing the feature with Twitter Blue members but that too remains to be seen.

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