Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey suggests that site might finally add much-request 'edit' tool

Famous tweeters including Kim Kardashian have suggested that the site should give people a way to make changes to their tweets

Andrew Griffin
Sunday 01 January 2017 12:02 EST
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Twitter Co-Founder and Chairman and Square CEO Jack Dorsey speaks onstage during 'From 7 Dwarves to 140 Characters' at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 9, 2014 in San Francisco, California
Twitter Co-Founder and Chairman and Square CEO Jack Dorsey speaks onstage during 'From 7 Dwarves to 140 Characters' at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 9, 2014 in San Francisco, California (Kimberly White/Getty Images for Vanity Fair)

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Twitter might finally let people fix their bad tweets.

The troubled company's CEO, Jack Dorsey, has suggested that he might have the site add an "edit" button so that updates can be fixed after they are posted. It was just one of a range of new year's resolutions that he made after taking requests from its users.

Mr Dorsey admitted that the site needs such an edit button, but said also that he will need to think more about how it can be rolled out.

The suggestion came after Mr Dorsey sent out a tweet asking users what they would want to see change about the site in 2017. A range of responses followed, including a number of people who asked for tweets to be allowed to be changed once they had been posted.

“Is it more important to edit for spelling/corrections? 5 minute window to edit mistakes or do you need to be able to edit anytime?” he asked users who suggested button.

“We're thinking a lot about it,” he added, writing that he too had needed to delete and re-post tweets a number of times because of mistakes he has made.

The edit button was by far the most common suggestion but others – some of which were highlighted by Mr Dorsey – included a way of letting people bookmark tweets and better safety and abuse options to make it easier to have bullies removed from the site.

Despite playing a central role in the US election and other news events, Twitter is struggling to keep its active users and to make money from the people who use it. Its share price has been plunging in recent months and it has been repeatedly criticised for not dealing with abuse and other problems.

Twitter has added a range of features in recent months, including changes to the way that conversations work that were rolled back just hours after they were pushed out. It has been criticised for the fact that those updates have a tendency to focus on cosmetic and minor updates – while ignoring what some users say is an abuse problem that is rife across the network.

An edit button has long been one of the site's most requested features. People doing so have included Kim Kardashian, who has sent a number of tweets requesting the feature and once said she had personally emailed Twitter asking for it to be implemented.

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