After Musk’s advance: Twitter gets an editing function

Panagiotis Kolokythas

Twitter has now confirmed that future tweets can be subsequently corrected and edited using an editing function. A feature that Twitter users have been asking for for a long time. The timing of the announcement is somewhat astounding: In a widely acclaimed survey on his Twitter channel, the newly minted Twitter major shareholder Elon Musk asked whether his users would like the editing function. So far, over 4.4 million Twitter users have participated in the poll, and over 77 percent answered “yes” to his question.

Hours after the start of the Musk poll, Twitter then announced in a tweet; “Now that everyone is asking about it… Yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year!” and then the sentence: “No, we didn’t get the idea from a poll,” followed by a wink smiley.

In the coming months, the editing function will be available via the

paid service TwitterBlue Labs
be released for testing. They want to learn what works, what doesn’t and what is possible. So it may be some time before all Twitter users actually get this new feature.

First an April Fool’s joke, then the announcement: did Musk have any influence?

The question remains open as to whether Musk had an impact on Twitter’s announcement. At least indirectly, because he helped the topic gain a lot of attention with his survey. And precisely because Musk is no longer just a Twitter user with a very, very large number of followers (80.7 million), but also recently held 9.2 percent of all shares in Twitter. Read more about it here: Elon Musk takes over 9.2% of Twitter – he is planning the first change.

It is also interesting that Twitter explained in a brief tweet on April 1, 2022: “We are working on an edit button”, which was interpreted as an April Fool’s joke.

In June 2021, Twitter had defended the abstinence of the edit button with the words: “You don’t need an edit button, you just have to forgive yourself.”