Day after Musk's Poll, Twitter Says Work for 'Edit' Button Going on Since 2021

Twitter revealed on Tuesday that it will soon begin internal testing of a long-awaited edit button feature. It further stated that construction on the project has been ongoing since 2021.

now that everyone is asking…

yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year!

no, we didn’t get the idea from a poll 😉

we’re kicking off testing within @TwitterBlue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible.

— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) April 5, 2022

As part of the announcement, Twitter included an animation that demonstrated how the functionality will work.

This came a day after Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who had purchased a 9.1% interest in the company, making him the company’s largest shareholder, initiated a poll asking consumers if they wanted an edit button. The results showed that 73.6 percent of the 4.4 million people polled approved of the feature.

The corporation further stated in the statement, ‘No, we didn’t get the concept from a poll.’

Before launching an “edit” function, Twitter’s head of consumer product, Jay Sullivan, stated the firm will welcome “feedback and adversarial thinking.” He also stated that the function will take time to perfect because “edit might be misused to modify the record of the public conversation without things like time restrictions, controls, and openness about what has been modified.”

The functionality will be tested first on Blue Labs, the business’s subscription-based service, in the coming months to “learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s conceivable,” according to the company.

For a monthly fee, Twitter Blue subscribers get exclusive access to premium features and app modifications. In June 2021, the service went live. An undo option that allows users to establish a time delay before tweets are published, allowing them to alter and fix text before it is made public, is one of the extra features accessible on the premium platform.