Twitter has been on the front pages of newspapers for several days now: the acquisition of 9.2% of the shares by Elon Musk, his attempt to climb – for now rejected – and the possible imminent appearance of an unprecedented “Edit” button have made rather noise on the web, so much so as to trigger endless discussions among insiders and even among simple users.
Waiting for developments on corporate events, we face the thorny issue of the tweet editing tool, a danger for some – like deleted messages -, an opportunity for others. That Twitter is working on it is now a fact, and it is not even a decision to be attributed (at least directly) to Elon Musk, given that the first signs of a change in this sense had occurred well before the acquisitions of recent days.
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However, how to reconcile the freedom to modify one’s own message published on the platform with the need to preserve the history of the message itself so that its variations over time are still accessible? It is the researcher Jane Manchun Wong to provide us with the answer: Twitter intends to exploit a trick allowing you to edit the messages and at the same time keep the original tweets.
In practice, every time you want to edit the text of a tweet, the platform will automatically create a new one. The modified message will therefore not be technically the same as the previous one, since it will have a different ID. In this way, Twitter will be able to keep the original tweet in its database, keeping track of all the changes that have occurred over time.
If this is the path taken by Twitter, it will be interesting to find out how the tweets embedded within the texts will be managed: the modified tweet will have a new ID, the original tweet will keep the original ID. Therefore, the embedded tweet will always remain the original one.
It is also not to be excluded that the Edit button can be intended exclusively for Twitter Blue, a premium version that Musk himself has defined as too expensive – and therefore unattractive – to which advertising should also be removed. In short, the intentions to revolutionize Twitter are all there, there is still no clarity on how this revolution wants to carry on.
