Twitter Rolls Out Edit Button to Subscribers in Canada, Australia, New Zealand

They get it before the US does.

Queenie Wong Former Senior Writer

Queenie Wong was a senior writer for CNET News, focusing on social media companies including Facebook's parent company Meta, Twitter and TikTok. Before joining CNET, she worked for The Mercury News in San Jose and the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon. A native of Southern California, she took her first journalism class in middle school.

Expertise I've been writing about social media since 2015 but have previously covered politics, crime and education. I also have a degree in studio art. Credentials

2022 Eddie award for consumer analysis

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Queenie Wong

Oct. 3, 2022 11:55 a.m. PT

2 min read

Twitter is offering an edit feature as part of subscription service Twitter Blue.

James Martin/CNET

Twitter said Monday it's rolling out a way to edit tweets to users who pay for its subscription service in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The social media company has been testing the highly requested feature and says the experiment "went well." Twitter is offering the edit button as part of its subscription service Twitter Blue, which costs $5 a month. The company makes most of its money from selling ads, but the edit button might entice more people to subscribe to Twitter Blue. Twitter said it plans to roll out the edit button for subscribers in the US "soon" but didn't give an exact date.

Last week, Twitter sent out its first edited tweet from the Twitter Blue account. Twitter users will know that a tweet has been edited because the tweet includes a pencil icon. Users will also be able to see what was edited by clicking on the icon.

now that Edit is rolling out in Twitter Blue Labs, here’s what you can expect
see that little icon? it’s there to let you know that the Tweet has been edited pic.twitter.com/Av6vZYuVeO
— Twitter Blue (@TwitterBlue) October 3, 2022

While the edit button could be helpful for fixing typos and spelling mistakes, there have been plenty of concerns that the feature could be abused. In 2020, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said in a Q&A with Wired that the reason why the platform hasn't traditionally had an edit button was because it started off as a text messaging service so "when you send a text, you can't really take it back." One of the concerns with building an edit button is that a user might retweet a tweet that's changed completely.

Even though Dorsey said at the time Twitter will probably never add an edit button, the company revealed in April that it's been working on the feature since last year. Billionaire Elon Musk, who is trying to back out of a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, polled his followers about whether they wanted an edit button. About 4.4 million Twitter users voted and 74% of those who responded to the poll said yes. Twitter said in April that the company didn't get the idea from Musk's poll.