Twitter will finally have an edit button, although you will have to pay for it

Twitter announced this Thursday that it is testing an edit button for users . However, the feature will only be available to those who pay for a $4.99-a-month Twitter Blue subscription (and will only be available in select countries for now, such as the United States and Canada),  the company said  , after a rush of requests from users to add the feature.

key facts

In a  Thursday tweet  , Twitter wrote "if you see an edited tweet," it's because "we're testing the edit button," adding "this is happening and you'll be fine."

The feature, which will be called "Edit Tweet," will be available later this month to Twitter Blue subscribers, and will allow tweets to be reviewed multiple times within 30 minutes of posting.

Edited tweets will have a label indicating the post has been changed with an icon and timestamp , while clicking the label will allow users to view previous versions of the tweet to "help protect the integrity of the conversation and create a publicly accessible registry.

Twitter hopes the feature will make tweeting "feel more accessible and less stressful."

Background

An edit button has been "the most requested Twitter feature for many years ," said Jay Sullivan, Twitter's vice president of consumer products. The pleas have come from numerous users, including Elon Musk, who is in an ongoing legal battle with the company over his attempt to walk away from a $44 billion deal to buy the social media platform. 

The company first announced  in April that it was working on the feature. Twitter, with more than 237 million daily active users, has been one of the only major social media platforms that hasn't offered such a feature, unlike Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and many other sites.

The new button marks one of the biggest changes for Twitter since it increased its character limit for messages from 140 to 280. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was replaced by the company's CTO Parag Agrawal , in 2021,  said that  the social network would probably never add such a button. 

The company began reconsidering adding the feature to try to attract more users who might be more concerned with how their posts look,  according to  the  New York Times. The social media platform launched Twitter Blue for US users in November 2021.

The announcement comes two days after Twitter  launched  Twitter Circle , a new feature that allows users to select a group of up to 150 people to Tweet with instead of all of their followers, similar to Instagram's "Close Friends" feature.