“The screenshot below may look a lot like an edited Tweet. That’s because it is, and you could be seeing more of them soon,” reads the opening of Twitter’s official Thursday morning announcement. Beginning today, the platform is internally testing an edit ability, and plans to extend the feature to a single country’s premium-paying Twitter Blue users later this month. “We’re hoping that, with the availability of Edit Tweet, Tweeting will feel more approachable and less stressful,” the blog post continues. “You should be able to participate in the conversation in a way that makes sense to you, and we’ll keep working on ways that make it feel effortless to do just that.” Twitter Blue currently runs you $4.99 per month—which just so happened to increase from $2.99/mo. earlier this summer. The subscription currently includes features like a customizable navigation bar, “Undo Tweet” option, and NFT profile pictures. If you’re suddenly considering signing up, you’re probably gonna have to wait a minute: Twitter Blue’s homepage is currently down at the time of writing. As desirable an edit button is for many Twitter users, many critics are wary of the socio-political and ethical implications of a poorly executed update. “These platforms are big enough that no change you could make would be an unmitigated good for every single user,” Gennie Gebhart, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told PopSci earlier this year. “With an edit button, you have to think what are the possibilities for harassment, for gaslighting, or for deception?” According to Twitter, however, current plans include the inclusion of a complete edit history for tweets, along with the ability to still see past iterations of a tweet. As it stands, the ability to edit one’s tweet will also only be available for the 30 minutes following initial publication, which may handle some of the worries surrounding the feature.
