Twitter CEO affirms that edit button will likely never happen

This decision has been made to protect users.


Despite the Twitter community’s constant yearning and begging for a tweet edit button, company CEO Jack Dorsey said in a video interview published this week by Wired that it’ll “probably never” happen.

For years, Twitter users have been advocating for an edit button so that they could correct published tweets with grammar errors or broken links. Internet celebrities famous in the Twittersphere like Kim Kardashian and Jeffree Star, too, have publicly endorsed their support for the addition of such a tool. While the company has acknowledged this request from the public, nothing had come out of it; though Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has noted that the company has considered adding variations of an edit button, he finally admitted that, “we’ll probably never do it.”

Dorsey cites several reasons why an edit button will never materialise on the platform including the company’s desire to stay true to the original, SMS text message-based platform as well as their ambition to keep users safe from retweeting content whose original message has been significantly modified.

Still, in an attempt to satisfy the service’s users, Dorsey explained that the company has considered giving users up to 30 seconds or a minute to edit their tweet; this would result in a delayed publication of all tweets, a change that doesn’t line up with the original purpose of Twitter, which is to connect people in real time with what’s happening in the world and in the lives of its users. Delaying publications would take away the live news aspect of the platform.

Ultimately, this decision has been made to protect users, therefore, as Dorsey confirmed, Twitter will definitely not be getting an edit button in 2020 or at anytime in the future.

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