The new edit button for Twitter has been found online, providing us our first peek at the future feature’s functionality and, more significantly, how it retains original tweets before any adjustments are made.
Twitter’s still-in-development edit button, shared online by researcher Jane Manchun Wong, makes it clear when a tweet has been modified, as a new clickable icon will appear beside the time and date for the tweet, indicating whether it has been “Edited” or that “There’s the latest version of the Tweet.”
Aside from the new icon that shows that a tweet has been edited, it looks that Twitter’s edit button will allow users to update everything of a tweet’s content, including the text and any associated material. However, in its current state of development, the feature is far from ideal.
As Wong pointed out in later tweets, Twitter’s current version of the edit button chooses to reupload any connected media rather than reusing it from the original tweet, which is a wasteful use of bandwidth. Editing a tweet might sometimes result in the video in the original tweet being turned into a static image, which is not ideal.