Twitter’s upcoming edit feature adds safety measures to ensure you’re only changing tweets out of necessity

Time limits and edit logs are the newest additions

After years of Twitter users clamoring for an edit button, the social platform’s CEO confirmed a few weeks ago that the feature would indeed arrive. We’ve already seen teasers of what the button will look like and how it would work on the web and mobile apps. Thanks to a prolific leaker, we may now have more information on how the edit button will work in practice.

Updating his previous thread, Twitter sleuth Alessandro Paluzzi shared screenshots of how an edited tweet could look. From the images, a blue pen icon alongside the text “Edited” will appear on the right side of the tweet date, whether it’s at the bottom (for an open tweet) or at the top (for tweets in threads or user timelines). The color suggests that this button would be clickable, which would make sense, considering the leaker shared an earlier picture showing an “Edit History” interface. This part of the workflow hasn't been fully fleshed out, but it should solve most concerns of tweets being changed to say something different after they’ve gone viral.

Speaking of safety, Paluzzi hints at another feature that would prevent users from misusing the edit button. According to him, tweets will only be alterable 1 hour after they go live. This should give users plenty of time to fix typos and ensure that the essence of a 5-year-old tweet is not changed to something else. That said, the images are just from the web version of Twitter. There’s little to suggest that the process would be different on the iOS and Android apps.

Aside from Elon Musk’s proposed aggressive Twitter takeover bid, the edit button announcement is one of the biggest Twitter news in years. And these new leaks give us a better idea of how the feature would work when it goes live.