This Is How Twitter’s Edit Button Can Actually Work

In June 2021, Twitter told the world “you don’t need an edit button, you just need to forgive yourself.” Twitter founder Jack Dorsey even held firm against Kim Kardashian’s pleas when she cornered him at Kanye West’s birthday party in 2018. “Everybody thinks it’s very easy to just put in an edit button,” says Christina Wodtke, a lecturer in computer science at Stanford University. Editing tweets has been Twitter’s most requested feature “for many years,” claimed Jay Sullivan, the platform’s head of consumer product. Twitter has also said that development of the feature has been underway since 2021—debunking any claims that a poll by Musk, asking users whether they wanted an edit button, was behind the decision.