Twitter's most-requested feature gets a very quiet rollout

Twitter logo. REUTERS

It's hard to think of a product feature that generated more headlines before it ever existed than Twitter's edit button. Yet the long-awaited and long-debated typo-fixer finally arrived this week, and you probably didn't even notice.

Twitter officially started rolling out Edit Tweets on Wednesday, a feature that lets people make changes for up to 30 minutes after a tweet is posted. It was initially rolled out to a small group—a subset of the subset of users who pay for Twitter Blue, the company's monthly subscription product.

It was a modest unveiling to say the least, especially for a product that celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Elon Musk have been asking about for years. And in that way, it was a success. The edit button's first 24 hours went by without any obvious impact or consequences. The site didn't crash, the tweets on my timeline weren't full of wonky appendages, and the world wasn't flooded with viral misinformation (at least no more than normal).

But the product's real test, of course, will come once it gets a wider rollout.

The main concern about editing tweets has long been around misinformation. It's not hard to imagine a prankster tweeting something innocuous—"I love puppies!"—and then changing the word "puppies" to something a bit more colourful after the tweet has been retweeted and favorited by a bunch of people. While that's a low-stakes example, you can also imagine more dramatic versions of this scenario playing out with serious news events—or alleged serious news events.  

With an important US midterm election fast approaching, it's a tricky time to test a product that seems primed for manipulation. Twitter has existed for 16 years without an edit button. "Why now?" is a fair question.

As someone who cares about typos, however, I'm hopeful those fears are overblown. Twitter's strategy for rolling out the edit button offers some encouraging signs to people who want it to work. For example, charging for editing privileges seems like a smart idea. Presumably it will mean editing tweets is primarily available to Twitter diehards with an incentive to pay the $4.99 per month for the privilege. It's not a lot of money, but it's an added obstacle that could help weed out some bad actors.  

I also appreciate that the ability to edit tweets is rolling out slowly to only a few small groups at a time. The internet loves to jump on a fad—good or bad—and giving everyone access to a hotly anticipated feature at the same time would be dangerous. But watching people fix typos slowly over time doesn't strike me as the kind of attention wave that bad actors will want to start riding.

Just 24 hours isn't long enough to judge any new tech feature, especially one that so few people have access to. But Twitter's decision to slow-roll its most highly requested feature of all time seems like a smart strategy—at least for now.