Known for favoring spontaneous, and sometimes epidermal, reactions, Twitter continues to develop regulatory tools for its users, in particular by offering them the possibility of correcting a tweet, at the risk of distorting it.
“Probably never”: this was the horizon given by the former general manager and founder of the social network, Jack Dorsey, to Wired magazine in January 2021, about the possible introduction of a tool to modify tweets after they have been broadcast .
A little over a year later, Twitter – which had already increased the length of its messages from 140 to 280 characters in 2018 – changed its tune by allowing a handful of Internet users to test this option which allows you to change your mind and correct a message.
This feature will initially be reserved for subscribers of its paid service Twitter Blue.
“We’re looking at how to build an editing tool,” product manager Jay Sullivan explained last week. He then confirmed a tweet from the official account of the platform dated April 1, which had suggested a joke.
According to Sullivan, this is the “most requested addition in years” by users wanting “to be able to fix (sometimes embarrassing) errors, typos and hot reactions right away”, so that rival Facebook has been offering it since its inception.
“These platforms encourage extremely rapid publication. Giving a right of correction even before seeing the external reactions arrive” is therefore “very interesting”, judges Sophie Jehel, lecturer at the University of Paris 8 and specialist in digital uses.
At the moment, the only way to rewrite a tweet is to delete it and then post another one.
– Calculated speeches –
Even if the “principle of rectification” remains essential, it would take “a sign showing that the message has been modified”, underlines Ms. Jehel. It points, among other things, to the risk of changes in discourse, depending on the comments received.
Aware of this potential problem, the social network teams warned that the tests would take “time”, in order to prevent the tool from being “misused”, in particular to “alter the archives of a public conversation”.
However, it will always be possible to take screenshots of messages before they are edited. Widespread use on Twitter, where cyberbullying can be very violent, as can “doxing”.
This practice consists of collecting information about a person, via past publications, and republishing them later to harm them.
In order to limit unwanted interactions, the social network’s security service has also just announced that it is testing the possibility of preventing any mention by another user, a mechanism similar to the “remove identification” option on Facebook.
“If someone you don’t follow mentions you, you’ll get a special notification. If you + un-mention yourself + from the conversation, the author of the tweet will no longer be able to mention you again”, detailed in 2021 the developer “Health and privacy” at Twitter, Dominic Camozzi.
The objective is to prevent the massive smear campaigns sometimes launched by Internet users against a member of the social network.
According to Angelo Zino, from the American investment consulting firm CFRA Research, this new feature however raises the risk of a “division” of communities, with “Twittos” who would block those who do not think like them, for example.
The analyst, however, believes that “Twitter should not take the same path as Facebook”, where everyone is free to define who can see their publications and react to them. The risk, according to him, would be to harm the lively exchanges that have become inseparable from the blue bird network.
However, he does not advocate immobility: noting that the platform has changed little in recent years, he sees in these new tools an opportunity to “give consumers what they want”, in particular “to the youngest”. Even if it means denying what made Twitter so popular.