New Edit Feature on Twitter Is Likely to Leave a Digital Trace

There have been a lot of discussions about the new Edit Tweet feature announced by the company and whether it is a good idea to have it or not.

Just as this name suggests, this feature is designed to allow users to edit their tweets after they have already been posted on the platform. This can surely be a useful function if you miss a word or mistype something in a tweet. At the same time, if a person already has many replies to a tweet and they decide to change the context completely, this will quickly become confusing.

As it turned out, this feature is likely to leave a trace in the history of your tweets on the platform. The Verge claims that this new tool is immutable and this means that Twitter replaces the old tweet with the newly edited one. The previous version is still preserved in digital history. As opposed to making changes to the same tweet that has been posted, a new tweet will appear and all the previous tweets will be saved.

According to Alessandro Paluzzi, a well-known app researcher, users will be able to access this feature by clicking on the three-dot menu next to the tweet and choosing the ‘Edit Tweet’ option there. One thing to note is that we still don’t know whether the tweet history can be viewed by anyone or it will be exclusive to users of Twitter. At this moment, we just have to wait and see how this feature will be realized by the company.

With this technology being in place, users of Twitter won’t have to worry that some people will be able to misuse the feature to their advantage. If the old tweets will remain in the system and can be verified, there will be no issue with people claiming that they said something different from what has been posted.

What do you think about this feature? Do you think it is necessary? Please, share your thoughts in the comments below!