Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey today commented on the possibility of an edit button for tweets, suggesting Twitter is considering a feature that might let people go back and add clarifications to older tweets.
As shared by Recode, Dorsey said that right now, there’s “no credible way” for people to “go back and clarify” their older tweets, a problem that Twitter wants to solve.
How do we enable people to quickly go back or to any tweet, whether it be years back or today, and show that original tweet — kind of like a quote retweet, a retweet with comment — and to add some context and some color on what they might have tweeted or what they might have meant. By doing so you might imagine that the original tweet then would not have the sort of engagement around it. Like you wouldn’t be able to retweet the original tweet, for instance. You would just show the clarification, you would be able to retweet the clarification, so it always carries around with it that context. That’s one approach. Not saying that we are going to launch that but those are the sorts of questions we are going to ask.
If the feature is created, it would be tested with journalists and newsmakers, which gives them a way to clear things up if something inaccurate or incomplete is tweeted.
Dorsey has been talking about adding some kind of edit feature to Twitter, something that most users on Twitter want for some time now, but no editing feature has materialized. However, the clarification feature mentioned here isn’t the type of editing option for typos and errors that people are hoping for, but it could let users add clarifications to tweets that will be seen by everyone. It’s like you will be adding annotations to a past tweet but not editing it.
