Barely arriving as a shareholder, Elon Musk initiates change on Twitter

Elon Musk already wants to change something on Twitter, and that could start with the Edit button.

Elon Musk, who most recently became the majority shareholder of Twitter, posted a poll on the platform asking users if they wanted an “edit”button. With the variants spelled “yse”and “on”, one might assume this is all a joke, but the poll was retweeted by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal with the caption: “The implications of this poll will be important. Please vote with a clear conscience”, hinting that this poll may actually result in the installation of the edit button.

Elon Musk already wants to change something on Twitter

Many users have been asking for such a feature for several years, but the platform has always resisted this request. In a 2020 Wired Q&A video, co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey said the site would “probably never”have such a button. He explained that the social network started out as a text messaging service and that you can’t “resume”a sent message. Twitter wanted to stay that way.

And it can start with the “edit”button

Elon Musk, who has always been a heavy user of Twitter, long before acquiring 9.2% of the social network, could serve as a catalyst for change. At the time of this writing, 74.7% of the 1,439,779 accounts that took the survey voted “yse”for the “edit”button. More recently, there was even a tweet posted on Twitter saying they were “working on an edit button”, but it was just an April Fool’s Day joke.

At the moment, no one knows how the “edit”button will work on Twitter, as content reposts are commonplace. If the person who posted the original content decides to change it, will the retweeted content reflect those changes? Will the “edit”button remain available indefinitely, or will it disappear after a while? Jack Dorsey explained in an interview with Wired that Twitter had previously considered giving users a 30-60 second window to correct themselves, which would be more than enough time to correct a typo or make minor edits.