Twitter’s Jack Dorsey explains why you’re not getting that edit button

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is gently putting his foot down about adding an edit button.

As flagged by The Verge, Dorsey recently sat down for Wired and answered a bunch of reader tweets. While no one asked why President Donald Trump is allowed to continue threatening war in violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service, someone did ask about the edit button and Dorsey answered succinctly: “No.” 

Dorsey actually elaborates as to why Twitter still hasn’t incorporated the edit button and he does make a good point: “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.”

That’s certainly true given the number of bad actors who use Twitter to spread hate. Like, you know, Nazis, something Dorsey knows a little bit about.

Plus, being able to change past tweets raises all sorts of other opportunities to sow chaos. You can change a tweet to change an opinion you shared or a declaration you made, which isn’t a big deal for your average user. But if a certain president wanted to, he could go back and alter old tweets to make it look like he supported a bill or action he originally opposed, pushing us further into Orwell territory than we already are.  

As for your typos, Dorsey’s response is also, well, too bad. “We’ve considered a 1-minute window or a 30-second window to correct something,” he says, “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.”

Of course, if you’re an Edit Tweet Stan, there is one single word in the interview that you can cling to with all your last hopes and dreams: “probably.” 

I mean, it’s not like Dorsey hasn’t trolled us before, so who knows?