Twitter CEO hints the 'edit' feature while speaking at IIT Delhi

Speaking at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey finally answered the most asked question - when will Twitter get the edit button? While Dorsey didn't completely confirm the feature, he acknowledged the possibility of such a function, but in the right way.

"When we hear about the edit button, you have to pay attention not to what people are asking you for but the use cases," Dorsey said. "What's the question behind the question? And a lot of people want to edit because they make mistakes on Twitter and they want to quickly fix them. They don't want to look bad. So that's a lot more achievable than allowing people to edit any tweet all the way back in time," he said.

Dorsey's comment hints that the company might be open to introducing such a feature that would let users edit the tweet, but only for a limited amount of time. But more substantial edits, like ones that completely change the meaning of a tweet, seems to be the biggest reason the company is yet to introduce the feature.

To explain this better, Dorsey presented a situation where a user tweets something that's then retweeted by those that are in support of the statement, but the original tweet has then been edited to a point where the people who retweeted no longer agree with. "And that's what we need to prevent," said Dorsey.

In what could be a potential solution to this problem, Dorsey said that change logs could show the time for how long the tweet has been edited.

"But ultimately we need to make sure we're solving a real problem," he said. "We've been considering edit for quite some time, but we have to do it the right way. We can't just rush it out, and we have to make sure that we're actually solving the predominant reason why people would do it, first and foremost. And then not making something that's distracting or takes away from the public record in doing so, because I think it's really critical that we preserve that."

Just like other major social media platforms, Twitter has also fallen prey to fake news and hoaxes. To avoid this, the company made changes to its reporting process letting users specify fake accounts and malicious content