Twitter could get an 'edit' button, but with some restrictions
Today, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey held a townhall meet with students at IIT Delhi. The co-founder of the 12-year-old microblogging platform spoke about his journey and answered questions ranging from the menace of fake news to promoting healthy conversations. But most importantly, he gave insight into the company's plan for the long-awaited 'edit' button for tweets. Here's what Dorsey said.
The long wait for 'edit' button
Twitter users have long been asking for an option or button to edit tweets. This, as many have said, could prove useful in correcting embarrassing mistakes/typos that are made when a tweet is posted. Even Kim Kardashian had asked Dorsey for the feature, but it has still not been introduced.
Twitter is exploring ways for implementing edit, says Dorsey
Nearly two years after first speaking about the 'edit' option, Dorsey detailed the progress and stressed that the company is looking into potential use cases of the feature and ways of implementing it. "We have been considering this for a while but we have to do in the right way," Dorsey said at the event, TNW reported. "We can't just rush it out".
Basically, Twitter wants to prevent abuse of the feature
The capability to edit tweets can prove useful, but the same feature can also be abused to change what has been said on the platform - months or even years ago. This is exactly what Twitter wants to prevent, whenever it implements the 'edit' button. "We can't make something which is distracting or takes anything away from the public record," Dorsey said.
How Twitter can solve this mystery?
Twitter is still exploring the case, but going by what Dorsey said, the solution could come in the form of a changelog or a way to prevent unlimited editing. "There's a bunch of things that we can do to prevent this, either by showing a changelog or showing how a tweet has been changed," he said. "We are looking at all this stuff".