Should tweets have an edit button, or is it just a silly idea?

Twitter has inadvertently become a medium of record, but one celebrity’s tweet has users demanding an edit button.

Youtube sensation and makeup artist Jeffree Star.

The tom-toms are beating again about being able to edit your tweets, but it’s an idea fraught with trouble.

As well as being a makeup artist, musician, and internet celebrity, Jeffree Star has 2.75 million followers on Twitter, so when Star tweets, many notice.

This week, when he suggested that Twitter has an edit button, an idea ventilated years ago, it is unsurprising the response was massive. His tweet generated 230,000 likes, 49,000 retweets and 1,300 comments. Masterful PR.

Dear Twitter, we need an edit button on our tweets. - Sincerely, everyone.

— Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) October 22, 2018

Twitter’s response of “noted” was liked 91,000 times.

But the issue remains. It’s sometimes annoying when, you have written a Twitter dissertation up to the permissible length, and realise 15 minutes later it doesn’t make sense, or there are terrible spelling mistakes, or words left out.

Of course you can delete the recalcitrant tweet and rewrite it, or copy the original tweet and paste it into a new trees and change it, but you lose all your likes and retweets gained in the interim. Wouldn’t it be nicer instead to make a quick edit, as you can in Facebook?

But there are complexities. Twitter has inadvertently become a medium of record, including by politicians, such as the US president, and being able to change the content of tweets would retrospectively alter what or what not was said on an issue. It would change the record of debate and throw subsequent comments on the matter out of context.

Politicians could deny they ever made statements that they had posted, having later edited them. Election campaigns could be thrown into chaos, with tweets making horrendous claims against opponents, only to be edited 10 minutes later into something innocuous and difficult to trace.

Then there’s the Trojan horse phenomenon.

Tens of thousands could retweet and like a post that looks totally innocent. But hours later, with the tweet already widely circulated, the poster could change the original content into a diatribe.

The originally tweet could have been about a beautiful sunset, but later changed into a call to arms across the world. Suddenly you’re one of many who have retweeted this grim call to all your followers, albeit having tweeted it in its original form.

Maybe Twitter could retain the original version in retweets as tweeted, but this undermines the author’s original intention to change things in a genuine situation. It also would be more complex for Twitter and its database to track several versions of the same tweet.

So it seems the old adage of “set in stone” has relevance to the digital world.

Should tweets have an edit button, or is it just a silly idea?