Twitter announced a much-anticipated feature last week — the ability to edit tweets. The company said that once the feature is available users will be able to edit their tweets for up to 30 minutes from posting. However, there’s a catch: users can only edit their tweets five times within this period.
While this limit seems sufficient for correcting typos, uploading media files, or adding some tags, the company might have introduced it to stop people from abusing the feature by changing the content on the tweet on a whim. The social media firm told TechCrunch that it’s currently observing user behavior and the number of edits available to users in the approved timeframe could change.
The “edit tweet” feature will be first available to users who pay for the optional Twitter Blue subscription, but it won’t be rolling out to all paid users initially. Twitter confirmed that New Zealand-based subscribers will first get the feature and it will be later pushed to Twitter Blue users in Australia, Canada, and the U.S once it learns more about usage patterns. So subscribers in these three countries might have to wait a bit longer and use the service without the marquee feature.
After the company laid out its plans for the edit button, experts opined that the tool could be used to spread political misinformation or crypto scams. But those instances will only come to the fore once a larger set of people start using the feature on regular basis. It’s too early to decide if the feature will become a menace or just an option for people to fix their dumb typos.
The social network has faced a ton of scrutiny over the past couple of months over how it has handled its security practices, spam-account-catching methods, and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) detection. The last thing the social media company would want is for one of the most anticipated features to cause havoc.