Twitter’s in-development Edit button offers hints as to how the feature could work

The ground-breaking news that it was going to offer users a way to edit the messages was announced this month. If it weren't for the Musk takeover attempt, it would have been the biggest story on the social network in years. A number of reverse engineers have documented the feature's early beginnings, and now it appears work on the Edit button has begun.

The Edit button was supposed to be used only by bad actors who wanted to alter the record of the public conversation. It's not clear how much of a difference highlighting the edit history will make. It's not clear how this will look in the user interface. The draft version of the Edit button gives us an idea of the company's current line of thinking.

Nima Owji, a reverse engineer, pointed out that there was a feature in the three that could be accessed. This would be a good place to correct a tweet, since you can do a lot of things from this menu.

Owji shows you how to post a corrected message to the timeline. Owji didn't know how the edit history would appear to other users. According to him, the Edit button on the website didn't create a new one, but instead created another one. He suggested that it would be possible to include the old version in a new version.

The Edit button was discovered by another reverse engineer. He noted that the user interface was not yet created where the original logs would be shown to other users.

pic.twitter.com/ifvIR3iNWP

— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) April 15, 2022

Jane Manchun Wong provides more information. The code references she found were related to the work-in-progress feature. She noted that the Edit button wasn't actually changing the text in the original tweet, but was creating a new one with the updated content.

She says that the new, edited tweets would have a list of the old ones.

The new tweet would point to the original one.

Looks like Twitter’s approach to Edit Tweet is immutable, as in, instead of mutating the Tweet text within the same Tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the amended content, along with the list of the old Tweets prior of that edit

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) April 16, 2022

This is one of the better ideas in regards to how to implement such a feature, which could be used to deceive the public.

If users were allowed to change the text in the original message, the old and new versions would point to the same account. Ben Sangster, a former employee of the social network, helped to investigate the idea of an edit feature back in 2015, which could be a nightmare for caching systems based on thetweet ID.

He thought that a user interface that provided a summary of engagement for all versions of the tweets would be a better option than a user interface where people could view the pre-version engagement directly. This could help to address accountability concerns, but it could also lead users to share the same information.

It was found that the potential for abuse was too high to move forward with the option, which was technically feasible.

Honestly, as complex as the implementation might end up being, the abuse vectors are going to be far harder to manage / mitigate. I was part of an effort to investigate this back in 2015-ish (?) and we concluded that the potential for abuse was too high to move forward.

— Ben (@sangster) April 16, 2022

To come up with a user interface that makes it obvious to users that a tweet has an edit history, while also making the edits easily accessible, is a significant challenge for the company. It needs to be clear to those who have clicked through to engage with the original that an edit has been made.

We could see a test version of the user interface for the Edit feature for Blue subscribers before it becomes a public version. Labs is a testing platform that could be used for such experimentation.

The company is still experimenting and figuring out the path forward, which could mean that the company hasn't solidified its decision for the user interface aspect to the system. The VP of Consumer Product, Jay Sullivan, had previously said that they couldn't share much about the status of the Edit feature at this time.

1/ We’ve been exploring how to build an Edit feature in a safe manner since last year and plan to begin testing it within @TwitterBlue Labs in the coming months. Sharing a few more insights on how we’re thinking about Edit https://t.co/WbcfkUue8e

— Jay Sullivan (@jaysullivan) April 5, 2022