Twitter user’s (sorry, “users”) who notice mistakes in they’re (whoops, make that “their”) posts have throughout the platform’s history found themselves out of lukc (agh, “luck”!). They demand an edit button, and finally, the company seems poised to give it to them.
The idea seems innocuous, even obvious. Yet it has provoked meme-worthy amounts of controversy. The reason for this clamor may be less practical than it is philosophical.
Elon Musk would probably tell you that he’s to thank for Twitter’s recent declaration that it is testing an edit tool at long last. The part-time Tesla CEO, part-time Internet troll and now part-time activist investor in the social media site he loves to hate posted a poll shortly after he acquired his 9.2 percent share: Did people want the button — “yse,” or “on”?
Twitter says the influx of “yses” didn’t influence its decision. In any case, the world’s richest man had, as is his habit, reduced a deceptively complicated subject to a handful of glib tweets.
Ask its proponents, and the edit button is about typos. Why should we suffer for the sin of confusing “your” and “you’re,” or misspelling Pete Buttigieg, or even mistaking a congressman for a senator before we’ve had a chance to drink our coffee? The only options are to delete (and lose any likes and retweets), to reply to our own missive with a sheepish correction, or to allow our mistakes to live on in embarrassing perpetuity.
Or maybe the edit button is about clarifying our meaning when we haven’t taken the time to consider how an Internet constantly at the ready to raise its hackles might interpret our well-intentioned commentary on Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Academy Awards. Don’t we deserve an opportunity to add the caveat, maybe in parentheses, that violence is never okay?
The problem is, for every righteous typo-averse citizen, there’s a bad actor eager to game any new system. Imagine someone revising a tweet after it has gone viral, so that a heartwarming video of a tiger nursing an orphaned piglet is replaced with misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus. Dangerous content could travel across the Internet incognito; likers and retweeters of the original, inoffensive version could be accused of approving of the incendiary revision.
People who post hateful or harassing material could also edit it after the fact, skeptics have suggested, and evade enforcement before going out and repeating the offense. Think of Donald Trump altering his declarations of a stolen election to avoid discipline after he learns exactly what language needs exactly what changes to avoid crossing a line — and arguing he’s not a repeat rule-breaker after all. If he’d had the chance to do as much editing as he did tweeting during his scheduled “executive time,” his account might still be around.
These criticisms don’t really make the case for no button at all. They make the case for a well-designed button. If you want to let people revise inconsequential errors but not recast entire narratives, limit the number of characters they can alter. If you want to allow in-the-moment reconsiderations without risking an already-popular tweet transforming before millions of people’s eyes, restrict the time window for tweaks.
The simplest mitigation of all is the one Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn have already put in place: Edited stuff says it’s been edited.
So why in the World Wide Web has it taken so long for Twitter to deliver to users what they’ve been begging for? Just ask Jack Dorsey.
“I own Twitter,” the company’s now-departed CEO said two years ago when pressed on whether he would introduce the feature in 2020. “The answer is no.” His stance stemmed from worries about abuse, but mostly it stemmed from something deeper. Twitter started as a text-messaging service: Send 140 characters to a short-code, and boom — you’ve done a tweet.
“When you send a text, you can’t really take it back,” he explained. “We wanted to preserve that vibe.”
So it’s a vibe. The point isn’t typos, and it isn’t exploitation. The point is what Twitter is as a service. The site, more than any other network, attempts to mimic real-life, to-the-minute conversation: overlaying the physical realm on to the digital one, and blowing every chat we’ve ever had up to thousands and thousands of times its size.
There aren’t takebacks when you’re texting, or when you’re talking. To contextualize, or clarify, you have to speak a whole new sentence — you can’t just rewind and respeak an old one. There’s only “oops” and “my bad” and living with the consequences. Maybe that’s for better and maybe it’s for worse, but it’s definitely Twitter. With an edit button, it won’t be anymore. Which is probably what Elon Musk wants.
"Opinion" - Google News
April 13, 2022 at 11:00PM
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Opinion | The argument over Twitter's edit button is all about vibes - The Washington Post
"Opinion" - Google News
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