Twitter’s edit button might not actually edit your tweets

What you need to know

Twitter has already confirmed that it is working on editable tweets.
A new report suggests that the tweets won’t be edited, but rather a new tweet created.
Older versions of the tweet would remain available and be linked to the new one.

Twitter’s editable tweets might not be editable tweets at all.

Twitter has already confirmed that it is — finally! — working on editable tweets. But a new report by one researcher suggests that the tweets won’t actually be editable and that Twitter will just create a new one instead.

While people have been asking Twitter to let them fix their typos for years, that might not really be what the recently-announced edit button will do. According to researcher Jane Manchun Wong, it appears that Twitter plans to create a new tweet, with a new ID, whenever someone tries to edit an existing one. That old tweet will then be linked to via the new one, creating a thread of sorts.

Looks like Twitter’s approach to Edit Tweet is immutable, as in, instead of mutating the Tweet text within the same Tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the amended content, along with the list of the old Tweets prior of that edit

Looks like Twitter’s approach to Edit Tweet is immutable, as in, instead of mutating the Tweet text within the same Tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the amended content, along with the list of the old Tweets prior of that edit

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) April 16, 2022

This would, in theory, mean that publishers who embed tweets — like the one above — into their content won’t need to worry about them being edited later. The tweet would remain as-is, with a subsequent edit being posted as an all-new tweet, complete with an original ID.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it already happened to some extent. Third-party developers have previously offered an edit button of sorts — a button that copied the content of an incorrect tweet and created a new one with it, ready to be edited. Once published, the original tweet would be deleted. The difference with Twitter’s approach is that the original doesn’t seem to be deleted but rather kept for posterity.

If that is indeed true, it won’t actually be what people have been asking for. Tweets with typos will still be around, haunting them forever.

Of course, it’s important to remember that Twitter itself hasn’t confirmed this and it’s likely that it could move away from this implementation before rolling editable tweets out. As ever, only time will tell.

For now, Twitterrific is one of the best iPhone apps for using Twitter and it already has its own edit button. Get it in the App Store now.