Twitter’s Newest Stakeholder Elon Musk And The Twitter Edit Button Debate

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently bought a 9% stake in the popular blogging/networking social media app Twitter, making him the largest stakeholder to date. Just hours after, Musk tweeted a poll “Do you want an edit button?”, and to signify how users cannot edit their tweets once they are posted, he purposefully misspelled the options as “yse” and “on”. With over 4 million votes, 75% voted in favor of an edit button. Many people took to tweeting their replies, voicing their overall concerns.

One user said Under two conditions. It’s only available for a few minutes, 5-10 mins. And when an edit is made, there’s a small link that shows the edit. This keeps a public record but allows the tweeter the ability to fix a simple mistake and not re-notify their followers with a new tweet”, to which Musk responded, “That sounds reasonable.” Another user stated “What if a tweet goes viral, lots of retweets & millions of impressions, & then the author completely changes the meaning? Not just a grammatical fix, but a TOTAL ideological change? Or shameless self-promote?”

Other users were trying to defuse the conversation by bringing up other social media platforms and their solutions to editing a post, with one user commenting “We solved this on Facebook a long time ago. You just include an indicator that it has been edited along with a changelog. If you are really worried about embeds they can point to a specific revision in that history but with a link to the latest edit. Not a real issue.” If we are being honest, Musk’s overall stance on Twitter as of right now is quite surprising given that just last month he asked his 80 million followers if they believed that Twitter truly followed the principle of free speech, and further stated that “free speech is an essential part of a functioning democracy.” The poll revealed an overwhelming vote of “no”. Even after this, Musk swooped in and bought a 9% stake in the company. His edit button poll comes not just hours after he became a stakeholder, but 3 days after the official Twitter account tweeted “we are working on an edit button.”

Many users were overjoyed, only to realize that it was an April Fool’s joke. In 2020, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey claimed that the company would “probably never” implement such a feature. However, later on, that year, still at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the official Twitter account tweeted “You can have an edit button when everyone wears a mask.” There are so many back and forths about the “Twitter edit button debate” and it’s not certain what will happen, so it looks like we will all have to just wait and see.

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