Here’s Why Twitter Will Never Have an Edit Button

CEO Jack Dorsey offers up one bad and two good reasons tweets won't be altered

Twitter
Marten Bjork / Unsplash

While the idea of editing tweets has been around as long as the social media platform (which launched in 2006), the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey has been hesitant to offer the feature.

In a recent video Q&A with Wired (via The Verge), Dorsey was asked about an edit button. “The answer is no,” he says. “The reason there is no edit button … we started as an SMS service, text message service. And as you know, when you send a text, you can’t really take it back. We want to preserve that vibe.”


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That’s an iffy rationale — technology changes and adapts over time. But Dorsey does make some better points, as he notes editing would make retweets obsolete — a user would essentially be “rebroadcasting” a different message than the one they intended to share.

Dorsey also says the company has considered a 30-second or one-minute window to allow for spelling corrections and fixing broken links, but that would also cause a delay in sending out a tweet … which negates the instantaneous feel of Twitter, one of its core characteristics.

So long story short: “We’ll probably never do it,” Dorsey concludes.

You can watch the full Q&A below.

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