Time and time again we’ve heard people request and cry out for an edit tweet feature. Why? Well, unlike Facebook or Instagram where you can edit your status/captions once you’ve posted, on Twitter a touch is a move. This means that once you’ve tweeted something if there’s a grammatical error or a spelling mistake, you can’t take edit the tweet. You would have to delete it or just leave it up if it’s already gotten engagement.
A time period?
Jack Dorsey, who happens to be the CEO of, Twitter commented on what an edit feature could look and work like for Twitter when he was recently asked about the feature. The issue was raised during the Joe Rogan show and Jack acknowledged that Twitter was looking at it:
You could build it such that, maybe we introduce a five-second to 30-second delay in the sending and within that window you can edit.
The issue with going longer than that is that it takes that real-time nature of the conversational flow out of it and then we’re delaying these tweets.
This sounds like a really practical solution because allowing users to just edit tweets way after they’ve been sent out could be used for the wrong reason. Without the time restrictions, I can foresee a situation where a person edits a controversial tweet to change what they said or someone intentionally editing a tweet after it’s been retweeted thousands of times in order to make something seem more popular and acceptable than it already is.
Considering that it took Twitter years to update the 140 character limit, it will not be surprising if this consideration is years away from implementation, or maybe worse; it never gets implemented at all.
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