The only way an “edit” feature on Twitter would work
How to provide what users want, while keeping them accountable for what they tweet
If you’re on Twitter, you surely know that one of the most common feature requests from users is the infamous edit button. Twitter, since the beginning, never offered the chance to editing tweets; you can either leave it or delete it (and rewrite it, if you want).
Twitter users seem to not be able to come to terms with this, even after almost 15 years since Twitter launched.
Most social platforms offer this feature. Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, Medium, etc, all let you edit your posts. But Jack Dorsey (and other people at Twitter) said multiple times they will probably never do that.
If the edit tweet existed though, we would never really know how dumb some celebrities can be. I’m joking of course — they could prove it in many other ways. But nonetheless, the possibility of tweeting something problematic and then not being accountable for it, thanks to sly editing when you realize things went sideways, would make Twitter a real hell (I mean, worse than now).
Twitter is widely used by politicians, probably more than any other platform, to make statements, endorse or condemn things, and basically push their agenda and talk to their base. We NEED to keep them accountable for what they tweet. Imagine someone like Donald Trump, who i̶s̶ was tweeting all day long some very controversial takes on pretty much everything. You want to be sure they take responsibility for what they tweet.
The problem with retweets
What if I retweet something and the author then changes it completely? Imagine someone tweeting how they hate pineapple on pizza. I’d agree with them and maybe I’d support it by retweeting. Now this person edits the tweet and says that pineapple is a great pizza topping. As an Italian, I might risk losing my passport for retweeting something like that!
It’s a joke, but that could have serious consequences. What if I retweet something nice a colleague of mine says about our company or boss, then she/he gets fired and edits the tweet to something mean? Without knowing what the original tweet was I might end up in trouble. And this retweet issue could escalate up to possibly even criminal charges and investigations, in extreme cases.
We obviously don’t want that. So is there a solution? Maybe. This is mine:
Keeping a history of the tweet edits as nested independent tweets is, in my opinion, the only way to solve this.
If I retweet something that later gets edited, my retweet stays the same, the edit is just creating another version of that tweet, that I did not endorse. If I’m ok with the edit I can retweet once more, but nobody can put words in my mouth without me knowing it.
The delete function would be global for all the versions, so I couldn’t delete just one version. Answers to the tweet would be nested to the version they answered to.
Is it more complex? Maybe, and this is just one of the possible solutions, probably the most obvious one. What is sure though, is that no edit is better than what could happen with editing without accountability.
What do you think?
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