Twitter announced that it is working on an “edit” button. This will allow you to change tweets up to 30 minutes after posting. For many people with the “fat finger” syndrome, this is a godsend feature, but it appears to be major drawbacks to it as well.
Edit button in the making
The social media platform published a blog post about a new edit button. Here, Twitter is telling that this button will allow users to edit a tweet up to 30 minutes after publishing. The company immediately warned about some confusion that may arise in the testing phase:
The idea of a Twitter edit button has been around for some time. Since the beginning of Twitter, several people have been denouncing the fact that it’s about the only platform where you can’t edit posts. Did you write something wrong? Then just delete it and make a new one.
Elon Musk also lived with this first-world problem and sent out a tweet that further fueled this discussion. This showed that almost 74% needed this button; enough enthusiasm you would think.
How can you hack with this?
Yet there is another side to this proposal, as not only careless people will benefit from this button. It will give hackers and scammers a new way to scam people. Rachel Tobac, an ethical hacker, told the Washington Post how this would work then.
“Someone will tweet something saying, ‘These two celebrities just started dating,'” she explains. This, of course, could cause this tweet to go viral. “Fifteen to 20 minutes later, they turn that into a crypto scam, a phishing link, disinformation about voting.”
And so they take advantage of this edit in a simple way.
Will this be the same in practice?
The only question is how many people would fall for this. Twitter itself already announced – in the blog post – that edited tweets will be provided with some kind of history. “Edited Tweets will appear with an icon, timestamp and label so it’s clear to readers that the original Tweet was edited. Tapping the label will take readers to the Tweet’s edit history, which includes previous versions of the Tweet,” the company told the blog.
This could already protect people from these edits, but not everyone is as meticulous. Especially not the people who need an edit button on Twitter.
