This is a growing debate among social media enthusiasts: Should Twitter give users the ability to edit their tweets?
At first, I didn’t see it as a big deal but the more I look at the growing trend of social media and how words and sentences can easily be misinterpreted, I’m actually leaning towards #TeamEdit.
What’s The Big Deal?
On Twitter, a single typo can make you a laughing stock on an online community which could easily spill in your real life.
A simple autocorrect problem can turn “you’re” into “your” and before you know it, that mistake has been retweeted hundreds of times and there’s no way for you to fix it.
“Just delete the tweet”.
That’s what most people say. If you make a mistake, simply delete the tweet and start again. But sometimes, it’s not all that simple.
I have sent tweets which have been favourited and retweeted a couple of times only for me to realise that there’s a small typo in it. I simply can’t delete that tweet and lose all these retweets (a bit vain but whatever). So people who now come to the pages of people who retweeted my tweet will now just see this and be wonder: I wonder what that tweet was?
So is it that difficult to incorporate an edit button which will allow users to edit their tweets to fix typos and mistakes? Once a tweet is edited, all users can see an “edited” sign right next to the tweet and maybe even see the original tweet.
Twitter could incorporate the feature so that once a user who edits a tweet, all other users can see an “edited” sign right next to the tweet and maybe even see the original tweet. Could it really be that hard to do that?
On Slack, messages can easily be edited to fix typos. On Facebook, I have made use of the edit feature to fix my status updates a couple of times.
Maybe there are other complexities I’m not thinking. Perhaps Twitter fears that there will be an abuse of an edit feature on their platform. People might send out a harmless tweet asking for opinions about something but then later change that tweet to something heinous.
I would probably guess that Twitter has other priorities maybe including fixing its online harassment as well as monitoring ISIS accounts or something like that.
Maybe Twitter is working on an edit feature and they are keeping it under wraps. But for now, we might just have to keep deleting our tweets when we make mistakes or just let those typos stay on.
But hey, if Kim Kardashian was asking for an edit feature in 2015, is it really that far fetched to want that feature?
I just emailed Twitter to see if they can add an edit feature so that when u misspell something u don’t have to delete & repost Let’s see…
— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) July 25, 2015
