Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey discusses how editing tweets could work

It’s a question that keeps popping up for Jack Dorsey.

In an interview with Joe Rogan over the weekend, the Twitter CEO floated how editable tweets, an oft-requested feature, would work on the platform. 

“You could build it as such so maybe we introduce a 5-second to 30-second delay in the sending,” Dorsey told the program. 

“And within that window, you can edit. The issue with going longer than that is it takes that real-time nature of the conversational flow out of it.”

Dorsey also revealed that Twitter was looking into making sure users could see the original tweet.

While the ability to edit tweets is a steadily requested feature, it’s understood that the platform has become the social media of record, and so editing can’t just be thrown in willy-nilly. 

For that reason, Dorsey is thinking about making editability dependent on the context.

“If you’re in the context of an NBA game, you want to be fast and you just want to be in the moment. You want to be raw,” he said. 

“But if you’re in the context of considering what the president just did, or making a particular statement, then you probably need some more time, and we can be dynamic there.”

Twitter’s functionality is based on SMS, and Dorsey explained it’s the reason why the company didn’t incorporate an edit function into the platform.

“Once you send a text, you can’t take it back. So when you send a tweet it goes to the world instantaneously. You can’t take it back,” he said.

But of course, it didn’t stop Twitter from increasing the character limits on its tweets — like SMS, tweets were limited to 140 characters, then were doubled to 280 in late 2017. 

So with Rogan, Kim Kardashian, heck, the whole Twittersphere asking the question, surely it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be able to edit a tweet. Surely.