Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has spoken out about the call to add an edit button to the social media platform. While speaking at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Dorsey said that his team is looking into introducing the “Edit” button but, the topic is controversial and requires deep thought before such a feature can be implemented.
Speaking on the topic, Dorsey said:
Then we hear about the edit button, you have to pay attention not to what people are asking you for but to the use cases. What’s the question behind the question? So I’ve misspelled something or I tweeted the wrong URL, and I want to correct it. So that’s a lot more achievable than allowing people to edit any tweet all the way back in time.
Twitter is already a hotbed of hoax and trolls. Adding an edit button, if done without taking the appropriate precautions first, would be like throwing fuel on fire. Context could be changed, content could be changed……..utter chaos!
Twitter is working on fixing this problem, and is considering various options.
There’s a bunch of things we could do to show a changelog and show how a tweet has been changed and we’re looking at all this stuff but ultimately we need to make sure we’re solving a real problem and solving a use case that people are seeing as friction within the service and making that easy for people to do. We’ve been considering edit for quite some time but we have to do it in the right way.
Twitter could perhaps take a leaf out of Facebook, or Medium, or Instagram’s leaf. All of these platforms have managed to implement the feature without the roof coming down. Edit has been a highly requested feature at Twitter, and while Jack’s fears are understandable considering all the scandals that have taken place during this tenure, he is going to have to look beyond them.
Meanwhile, you can catch the full event by clicking here.
