Twitter to add Edit button, learn how to use it

As Twitter plans to give its users an Edit button, after a push by its soon-to-be boss Elon Musk to help them correct errors in their tweets, app researcher and reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong on Tuesday revealed the first glimpse of the new tool.

She tweeted a video with the steps needed to edit a tweet. A user has to press a button called "Edit Tweet" in the drop-down context menu, and then he or she can edit the post.

"The current unreleased version of Edit Tweet reuploads media (images, videos, GIFs, etc) instead of reusing them. Inefficient use of the bandwidth and media processing power - plus it turns my video into an image (mishandling media type)," she said in a tweet.

At the moment, it looks like a user will get 30 minutes after publishing a tweet to hit the Edit button.

One may even replace the entire media (photo/video file) embedded with the tweet.

The Edit button will show the user the entire original content, and the user can then either delete the whole post or start over, as the tool appears not just for grammatical errors.

Earlier reports suggest that the micro-blogging platform is also going to keep a digital trace of your earlier tweets.

Wong said the edit button may have an "immutable" quality.

"Looks like Twitter's approach to Edit Tweet is immutable, as in, instead of mutating the Tweet text within the same Tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the amended content, along with the list of the old Tweets prior of that edit," Wong posted last month.

Initially, the edit button will be available to Twitter Blue users and will be extended to all at a later stage.

Amid Musk's $44 billion takeover bid, Twitter last month announced that it is working to allow users to edit their tweets after posting them to fix typos and errors.

Jay Sullivan, the company's VP of consumer product, said that the edit button has been the most requested Twitter feature for many years.

"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," he had commented.