Twitter might be testing an edit feature for tweets, report suggests

Looks like Twitter may be testing an edit feature for tweets, according to a report by the Financial Post.

It all started Wednesday morning when Twitter Canada’s managing director, Rory Capern, said via tweet — of course — that he was grateful for the chance to lead the team after news broke that he was leaving.

Financial Post reporter, Josh McConnell, reported that Capern’s initial tweet had a typo, though. Instead of writing “grateful” he had “greatful.” The Financial Post ran its original story with a “(sic)” to denote the typo, but discovered later that the misspelling had been fixed.

McConnell points out in his story that “the corrected tweet shared the same URL as the original — which isn’t the case when someone deletes a tweet and reposts it.” Meaning, there’s a really good chance Capern could have been testing out an edit feature for Twitter.

So far Twitter has declined to comment.

This is a feature many Twitter users have been asking for for years, but the request comes with some controversy.

Giving users the ability to edit their tweets, without showing any proof of an edit or what was changed means primary documents could be altered (potentially) without warning.

Sure, fixing a small typo on Twitter is no big deal. Having that ability might’ve even killed the covfefe internet sensation before it ever started. But more and more, politicians like President Donald Trump have become accustomed to making statements on the platform. Giving them the ability to amend tweets could also give them license to change their message or stance entirely.

Additionally, if the president were able to edit his tweets, that could be a violation of federal records law. Allegations that the White House failed to adhere to the law have come up before, as a result of Trump deleting tweets and using private messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp.

As a result, ProPublica keeps an archive of Trump’s deleted tweets.

This story was originally published August 23, 2017 at 11:55 AM with the headline "Twitter might be testing an edit feature for tweets, report suggests."