Twitter users might be clamoring for an edit button, but the social media site has no plans to honor those requests, said co-founder Jack Dorsey on Tuesday.
Dorsey, answering user questions in a video from Wired, said there were “practical considerations” that make the addition of an edit button challenging.
Twitter, Dorsey said, started as an SMS messaging service, where messages could not be changed once sent. That heritage is a big part of the reason the company resisted initial calls for an edit button.
“We wanted to preserve the vibe and feeling in the early days,” he said.
The edit button is one of the most requested features on Twitter. And Dorsey has teased the idea of adding one before, but now seems to have ruled it out.
With the service now being used on a wider number of platforms, and a much larger number of users, the company’s concerns have shifted. By letting users edit their Tweets, said Dorsey, others could inadvertently spread rapidly changing misinformation or opinions they don’t agree with.
“You might send a tweet and someone might retweet that and an hour later you might completely change the content of that tweet,” he said. “The person that retweeted the original tweet is now retweeting and rebroadcasting something that is completely different. So that’s something to watch out for.”
Don’t think about suggesting a time frame to correct mistakes you notice as soon as you hit the Tweet button, either. Dorsey preemptively ruled that out as well.
“We’ve considered a one minute window or 30 second window to correct something, but that means we have to delay [the Tweet] before we can send it out,” he said. “It’s just work, but we’ll probably never do it.”
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