Twitter's Edit Feature Is Coming

The sought-after feature has been in demand since the dawn of Twitter, but the wait isn’t exactly over. Still in its trial phase, the feature comes with its fair share of caveats. The beauty of Twitter has always been its un-filtered, typo-filled, decades-spanning archive of every single thought of every one of its 396.5 million users. We know what we have to gain with an edit button, like being able to change “youre” to “your” in your suddenly viral tweet, but what do we stand to lose if we can edit the unfiltered? For those of us who like living “on the record,” there is a lot at stake.

To protect the integrity of our favorite internet hellhole, Twitter added some fine print to the new feature. The edit button will self-destruct after 30 minutes. Users will be able to fix the unfortunate typos on their viral tweets in the nick of time, but will not be able to edit their 2013 hot takes. *cancel culture lets out a collective sigh of relief*

Beware, because Twitter will also keep receipts. Edited tweets will also be marked as “edited” and edit history will be made available to extremely-nosy Twitter users (which is all of them).

The function will be available to the app’s internal team and expanded in a field test to Twitter’s premium Twitter Blue subscribers later this month, making the "edit" feature a strange class signifier of our extremely-online society. But fear not — we’ll still be slinging typo-ridden tweets until the edit button hits the open market, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

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