Here’s what Twitter’s still-in-development edit button looks like

The edit button has been a joke for longer than I can remember, but it is finally becoming a reality, and Jane Manchun Wong, who makes it her mission to find hidden features in companies' code.

The editing part is pretty simple, you just have to press a button in the context menu. It looks like you will get 30 minutes after you hit that button, and it will open a window with your entire original content in front of you, and you can publish whatever you want. It is not just for words.

the current unreleased version of Edit Tweet reuploads media (images, videos, GIFs, etc) instead of reusing them. an inefficient use of the bandwidth and media processing power, might be lossy too. plus it turns my video into an image (mishandling media type) pic.twitter.com/HjoIA0CZhO

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 2, 2022

How can readers tell if you messed with the facts and messed with what you said? There is a button next to the timestamp that you can click to go to an Edit History page.

Wong added that for dramatic effect after he removed the "soup" bit.

As Wong mentioned a few weeks back, it is not clear whether the back end of the service will automatically propagation, or if it will be making each individual tweet immutable. If you are reading a story with an old embedded that got rewritten, will you see the new one or the old one? Unclear!

If you're looking at the old, unedited version of the message, you'll be warned about it. There is a new version of this Tweet below. It will take you to the newest version right away if you click that.

Wong tells me she thinks it will work this way.

trump originally tweets “covefe”, the tweets get ID #1, people embed the ID #1

then trump creates a new edit “coffee”, the new edit (technically a new tweet) gets ID #2, while the original tweet (#1) becomes the first version of the Tweet

and then in the embedded tweet which still points to #1, now shows “there’s a new version of this Tweet” indicator

It makes sense to me. It sounds like the solution that the Verge contributing editor suggested in 2017:

I propose an option in a tweet’s inverted-caret drop-down menu that reads thus: “edit tweet.” Tap it and you can correct any mistake and republish. The new version is served across Twitter wherever the tweet exists, including retweets and quote-tweets. Next to the tweet’s timestamp, a prominent new word appears: “edited.” Tap the word and Twitter displays the previous versions of the tweet underneath the latest one.

It sounds like the Edit History may be a different page.

These findings are very tentative because Wong hasn't been able to publish any completed, edited tweets to Twitter yet. She was able to see the user interface in action by running the app client-side.