We survived four years of a Trump presidency, two years of a global epidemic, and the beginning of a war. If you look outside, you will see that nothing is on fire. The universe is still being held together by one small thread, and it doesn't have an edit button.
On April 1st, it was announced that it was working on an edit button. It was a joke. Things have gotten more serious this week, as evidenced by the fact that Musk took a seat on the board. He asked his followers if they wanted an edit button. More than 3 million people have voted so far.
Do you want an edit button?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 5, 2022
Since the days of 140-character messages, users have clamored for an edit button. Sometimes we want things that aren't good for us, like when you ate a whole pizza even though you weren't taking Lactaid.
It was worse before 2015, when anyone could reblog your posts and have full editing control over them, making it look like you never said anything. This ability was weaponized to the point that young adult fiction author John Green was bullied off of the platform, prompting Tumblr to fix the problem.
One still cares about Supernatural in the year 2022, and one is the defacto watercooler for politicians, venture capitalists, tech executives and journalists. It's not hard to imagine how a bad actor could take advantage of a feature like this. The original poster might change the text to make it look like everyone who reblogged it had agreed with the message. Things could get messy very quickly.
An edit button that indicates when a post has been edited could be an answer. It's not as though Facebook is known for its ability to mitigate misinformation.
Last month, Snopes uncovered a scam in which the perpetrators edited ten years of Facebook posts to make users believe that it was the real David Rosenberg. Ten years of history was shown about how the fake Rosenberg helped people get out of debt. The address of the scam artist's wallet received around 3.4 bitcoins.
Alex Stamos, the director of the internet observatory and former chief security officer at Facebook, said that these kinds of scam tactics could be applied on the micro-blogging site with an edit button. According to Stamos, he has seen these kinds of tactics successfully used by swindlers to steal millions of dollars.
A lot of people are underestimating the abuse potential of an edit button.
Recently looked at a massive cryptocurrency scam that was supported by automated editing of a verified FB page's posts to create a legit-looking brokerage. The abuse state diagram here is massive.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) April 5, 2022
Being able to retroactively fix typos is one of the pain points that an edit button would solve. A slip of the thumb can change a story for journalists reporting on the go. One way to mitigate these mistakes is for the journalist to own up to the mistake and correct it in a subsequent post. The method isn't perfect, as people could have already seen the false information, but an edit button doesn't necessarily help, because anyone who saw the tweet before the edit wouldn't know that it was later fixed.
Before that time period elapses, you can hit an , which is a feature that delays the publication of a tweet by a few seconds. This feature should suffice for issues like typos. If Musk's followers get their way, we will lose sleep over it.
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