Twitter promoted an edit feature that’s not really an edit feature

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey may have put his foot down about adding that long-sought-after edit button, but the social media giant seems happy to promote another company that’s made one.

Only problem? It’s not really an edit feature at all — but Twitter’s calling it that anyway.

Twitter has attempted to take itself off the hook by promoting platform Brizzly, with the @TwitterDev account tweeting its praises on Tuesday, calling out a brand new, so-called “edit feature” available as part of its paid service Brizzly+.

Brizzly+ is a subscription service boasting what’s self-described as “the closest thing to an edit button for Twitter,” with several features that allow users to undo, redo, and automatically delete tweets. 

Suffice to say, it’s a bit of a stretch, as the closest thing to an edit button here is Brizzly’s “undo” feature, which gives you a certain amount of time to undo a tweet after you hit send — according to Brizzly, you can set this window up to 10 minutes. Once the set “undo” time has lapsed, you can’t edit after publishing. 

It’s less of an actual edit button, more akin to Gmail’s recall function, which lets you unsend emails for a short time after you’ve sent them. Right after you send a message you can retract it by clicking “undo” within a set cancellation period of 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds (you can set this yourself in Settings).

Other features Brizzly is promoting are an auto-delete feature, which lets you decide if you want your tweets automatically deleted after 24 hours, seven days or a month, and a redo feature, which again, isn’t exactly an edit button. Instead, it lets you replace existing tweets with an edited version. 

“It’s not a ‘true edit’ since that’s not supported by Twitter, but we’ll copy the post into a new text field and allow you to edit it,” reads Brizzly’s FAQs. “Upon sending, your old tweet will be deleted and you’ll have a shiny new, correct tweet.” 

So, while Twitter is unlikely to roll out its own edit button anytime soon, it seems to be happy to promote platforms that are sort of doing the job (but not really). CEO Dorsey has been pretty clear regarding Twitter’s objections to edit buttons, primarily the chaos that could come from being able to change opinions in a snap. “You might send a tweet and then someone might retweet that and an hour later you completely change the content of that tweet and that person that retweeted the original tweet is now retweeting and rebroadcasting something completely different,” he .

As for typos, which Brizzly’s ‘undo’ feature could rectify, Dorsey said that Twitter has indeed considered a feature like this, but that Twitter’s unlikely to actually roll it out. “We’ve considered a 1-minute window or a 30-second window to correct something,” he said, “but that also means that we have to delay sending that tweet out because once it’s out, people see it. So these are all the considerations. It’s just work but we’ll probably never do it.”

This might be as good as it gets, edit button campaigners.