Being able to edit a tweet sent a little too quickly is undoubtedly one of the most requested features by Twitter users. The platform had long refused to offer such a function, but recently revealed that it had been working on an Edit button for several months.
And this editing function could arrive very quickly. Several reverse-engineered developers pored over Twitter’s code and were able to access and test this editing feature.
This Edit button, which Twitter will reserve for Twitter Blue subscribers (at least for now), is accessible from the options menu, represented by three small dots, displayed at the top right of the tweet to be edited. An editing window then opens to allow you to correct the message, before clicking on an “Update” button to validate the correction of the tweet. However, there is currently no information on how Twitter intends to display the editing history of a tweet, as the dedicated interface is not yet available.
However, Jane Manchun Wong, a developer who specializes in software reverse engineering, found several elements in Twitter’s WebApp code that reference this change history. She discovered that this Edit button did not really correct the initial tweet.
In reality, rather than correcting it, Twitter creates a new tweet with the updated content and would associate a new unique identifier. And it’s a new tweet that would include a list containing all the corrections that have been made by its author, with the added bonus of a link to the initial tweet.
The ability to edit the content of messages posted on Twitter is indeed a particularly sensitive issue. By allowing tweets to be edited, the platform fears the feature will be misused. By associating a new unique identifier (and therefore creating a new tweet) with a corrected tweet, Twitter ensures that the content of the original message is preserved so that it can be integrated into the modification history.
Twitter having for the moment chosen to test this edit button only among users who have subscribed to its paid Twitter Blue offer, it will probably be necessary to wait several more weeks for the functionality to be deployed on a larger scale for the rest of the platform users.
Source : TechCrunch