New Zealand leads the world again, this time with the country’s paid subscription Twitter Blue customers being selected as the test bed for the app’s new “edit” feature. It will be followed by Australia, and if all goes well, the feature will be extended to consumers in Canada and the United States. When or if the feature will be extended to the remainder of Twitter’s 230 million users, however, is uncertain.
New Zealand has been a test bed for new telecommunications technologies since at least the 1990s, given its small but relatively sophisticated consumer base. The population is large enough and sufficiently representative of larger markets to enable both assessment of the benefits and identification of overlooked flaws and drawbacks in mass-market use.
The lack of an editing feature has long been a bugbear of Twitter users, to the extent it has almost become a joke that misspellings and other trivial errors cannot be corrected as they can be on, say, a website. More than 70 percent of respondents to an Elon Musk–originated Twitter poll said they wanted an edit feature. Ostensibly, the lack of an editing capability is a design feature coming from the app’s origin as a means of sending an SMS message to multiple people. As it was not possible to take back and edit an SMS once sent, neither would it be possible to edit Twitter messages after they had been posted. However, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has been quoted as saying there was concern that an editing feature would allow the content of tweets to be changed long after they had been posted.
The new feature for testing will allow users to make up to five changes within a 30-minute window of the tweet being posted. All edited tweets will be flagged “with an icon, timestamp, and label so it’s clear to readers that the original Tweet has been modified. Tapping the label will take viewers to the Tweet’s Edit History, which includes past versions of the Tweet.” Hence, the audit trail of edits will be transparent.
App developers will be “paying close attention to how the feature impacts the way people read, write, and engage with tweets” as they observe and learn how users respond.
Of particular interest in the New Zealand trial will be the extent to which malicious use of the feature occurs. One risk identified is that a user may edit a tweet after it has gone viral and turn it into a “crypto scam, a phishing link, [or] voting disinformation.” The risk of disinformation spreading is especially feared given that “false tweets have been known to move markets within minutes or even seconds,” according to the Washington Post. Adding text descriptions of images (alt text) after they have been posted and subsequent posting of images after the fact have also been seen as particular risks.
Other critics, however, are cautiously optimistic that the benefits to consumers will outweigh these potential costs. That the feature is confined to customers paying a subscription fee may ensure it is used by those who value the feature most for its intended reasons of improving the presentation of a tweet full of typos or erroneous predictive text.
Of course, Twitter itself will be hoping the feature proves valuable enough to attract more users to the subscription model, thereby reducing its reliance on digital advertising revenue, which has apparently stalled for the firm in recent times. The New Zealand test will be interesting in this regard, as there is a tendency for consumers there to resist paying for enhanced tech features when free versions exist—as evidenced by the longer-than-average time it took for internet users to switch from “free” dial-up broadband to “expensive” broadband. (Many consumers not using streaming applications that required the capacities of broadband were satisfied enough to stay with dial-up.)
It will also be interesting to see how different categories of users make use of the new feature. Twitter has a strong following among New Zealand’s political classes, so their use of edits to change content as opposed to simply changing grammar and typos could prove an interesting measure of their responsiveness to social media pressure.
Finally, it will be interesting to see whether the trial in and of itself leads to any changes in social media policy and practice more generally. The transparent audit trail in the Twitter trial is more comprehensive than that available in other media, so it may become a benchmark to which other platforms are required to perform. As New Zealand’s prime minister has announced an intention to “exercise a degree of global leadership on wider digital and tech issues,” the Twitter trial may inform policy as much as it informs practice.
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