Despite the fact that Twitter users are very less compared to other platforms even then it’s significant. Twitter has around 1.75 crore users in India, which may be less than 1% of India’s actual population. Even then it’s way more influential and ‘powerful’ compared to LinkedIn and Facebook. In fact, all official information from government and respective officials are tweeted first and news organisations across the world make headlines from tweets of important people on a regular basis. So, there’s higher credibility compared to other platforms.
We are programmed since our childhood to not trust politicians. It is known that politicians and government officials take back their words whenever it’s convenient. We have heard enough promises and we now know that words of powerful people are meant to be twisted. Even if a leader promises free Wi-Fi and gives tall speeches on Twitter before election, we know for a fact that he will put some terms and conditions or roll out some disappointing Wi-Fi service after he has won the election.
There’s a saying in politics: what you say and what people hear is mostly different. Well, not that Twitter’s edit button (or the lack of it) will change much in politics but at least you now have the option to trace back tweets of powerful people and hold them accountable. Without the edit tweet button you can hunt down the promises politicians had made on Twitter in the past and call them liars. Without the edit tweet button, at least you have a public digital record of whatever that person may have said in the past and call out the hypocrisy.
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You may argue that nothing much will change with Twitter having the edit button. And you may be right: the edit button won’t change things much. Politicians and powerful people always find their ways across tough questions. But the bigger question is what happens to the retweets, quotes and likes after a tweet has been edited?
Just for the sake of an example, let’s consider this, if Elon Musk tweets “..the world should make more babies" and this tweet gets thousands of likes and retweets. And tomorrow, if Musk decides to edit this same tweet to say: “…the world should NOT make more babies". What happens to the retweets and likes? By now, we all understand the value of likes and retweets.
Elon Musk is one of the most influential ‘fans’ of Twitter. Musk has expressed his love for Twitter in the past. He has also been vocal about how much he dislikes Facebook. And now, he has taken his love for Twitter a notch higher by acquiring a 9.2% stake, making him the largest outside shareholder of the social media platform. And soon after he acquired 73,486,938 shares of Twitter, he started a controversial poll: “Do you want an edit button?"
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was quick to respond, “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully." Co-founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey was strictly against the idea of an edit button and in an interview in 2020 with Wired, he made it clear that Twitter will probably never get an edit tweet button.
He belongs to the school of thought where words once spoken can’t be taken back or ‘edited’. “We started as an SMS, text message service. And as you all know, when you send a text, you can’t really take it back," he had said.
Of course, Twitter lets you delete whatever you have tweeted. Even for old tweets, you can use third-party apps to delete them. You really need not suffer the consequences of your teenage opinions throughout your life. So, when you can delete tweets, what’s the point of not having the option to edit tweets? Not to forget, other popular social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn let you edit your post and showcase a small ‘Edited’ note beside the date of the post.
TWITTER EDIT TWEET BUTTON: WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LIKES AND RETWEETS
The edit button is more than just to help you to correct your typos. Coming back to the question: what happens to “Likes And Retweets" when a tweet is edited? Ideally, to keep Twitter a sane and valuable place, if at all an edit button is added to Twitter, the feature should automatically undo all the retweets and likes and make it appear as a fresh tweet. But there’s another problem: what happens to ‘Quotes’? Should Twitter automatically delete quoted tweets of other users when the original tweet is deleted?
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One thing is clear: Twitter can’t simply let users away by editing their tweets by adding an ‘edited’ tag on the tweet and providing a hyperlink to the edit history. Twitter simply can’t allow people to get support (through likes and retweets) from other users by sharing a popular point of view and then letting them retain that support after the tweet has been ‘edited’.
Now, if the ‘tweets and retweets’ counter is reset then there’s hardly any difference between editing a tweet and posting a new tweet. One aspect can be thought about is that, giving the option to edit tweet within a strict time limit. For example, you only get five minutes to edit your tweet. But then for some influencers five minutes is enough to garner hundreds of retweets and likes. What happens to them? Twitter can also think of a solution were verified handles having more than a certain amount of followers wont get the edit button at all.
Clearly, the job is not easy. So, the consequences of the edit button is indeed something to be concerned about. You simply can’t have it all.
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