Highlights:
- Elon Musk, who has disclosed a 9.2% stake in the microblogging site, making him its largest stakeholder, tweeted, “Do you want an edit button?”
- In response to Elon Musk’s poll, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tweeted that the poll’s consequences will be important. ‘Please vote carefully,’ he said.
- According to Musk’s poll, one out of every four users on the popular micro-blogging site still don’t want an edit feature.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the founder of SpaceX, revealed earlier this week that he has a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter which is worth $3 billion. This makes him the company’s largest shareholder. Now, it appears like Musk will use his influence on Twitter to implement one change that people have been asking for years: an ‘Edit’ button.
Musk simply asked, “Do you want an edit button?” in a straightforward tweet, attaching a poll with two answers, possibly intentionally mistyped as ‘yse’ and ‘on.’ This might be a smart nod to spelling mistakes, which is one of the main reasons Twitter users have been requesting an edit button.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal quote tweeted Musk’s tweet saying “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.”
The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully. https://t.co/UDJIvznALB
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) April 5, 2022
Earlier, Musk had publicly questioned Twitter’s commitment to free speech in a poll he conducted on March 25th on his Twitter account. “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” the CEO questioned, before adding in a follow-up tweet that “the consequences of this poll will be important.”
The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 25, 2022
Musk is among Twitter’s most prolific users and has used his reach to question the platform’s commitment to free expression. With him becoming the largest stakeholder at Twitter, we can expect big changes coming to Twitter.
On April 1, Twitter said that it was working on an edit button, which many assumed was an April Fools prank. As per Reuters, when questioned if the tweet was a prank, the company said, “We cannot confirm or deny, but we may edit our statement later. “
For some context, an edit button on the microblogging platform has been a long-requested feature. Twitter, a platform utilised by many journalists, politicians, and other influential people throughout the world, has always been rigid about tweets, allowing no edits to a tweet after it has been posted.
The question of whether or not Twitter should include an edit button is still up for debate. At the time of writing, 74 percent of people support an edit option on Musk’s tweet, while 26 percent oppose it.
The Liz Wheeler Show’s Liz Wheeler (@Liz Wheeler) responds to the poll by pointing out how an edit button might be used to completely modify the sentiment or meaning of a tweet after it has garnered a lot of traction. Meta CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (@boztank) suggested that a simple ‘edited’ mark on tweets that have been edited may fix the problem, something that Facebook already does.
We solved this on Facebook a long time ago. You just include an indicator that it has been edited along with a change log. If you are really worried about embeds they can point to a specific revision in that history but with a link to the latest edit. Not a real issue.
— Boz (@boztank) April 5, 2022
There may be other ways to prevent this, such as making tweets editable only after a specific amount of time has passed after they’ve been published. This would allow users to quickly fix misspelled words, tag persons they forgot to tag, and make other changes to important tweets. Currently, such tweets need to be deleted and re-posted.
Twitter is likely still debating whether or not to add an edit button to the platform, and it’s unclear how important Musk’s poll will be in making that decision. Perhaps we’ll find out in the coming weeks.
