Some experts say a Twitter edit button could be used to spread political or financial misinformation or to add crypto scams and phishing links into viral tweets
Washington Post
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter had already been testing interventions against misleading content, from exploring user flags for harmful or false posts to warning people before they amplified tweets covered by its misinformation rules. The edit-button debate extends that problem from sharing a post to changing it after it has gained reach.
Code reviewed earlier in 2022 indicated that edits would create a new version while retaining prior tweets in a history, making version transparency central to the feature rather than an optional moderation layer. The experts’ concern is that a viral post’s accumulated trust and distribution can be repurposed after publication.
First-order effects
Twitter’s edit-button design must make prior versions and edit histories prominent enough for readers to detect a political claim, financial pitch, crypto scam, or phishing link added after a tweet goes viral.
Users and organizations relying on a tweet’s original wording face a new verification task: checking whether a widely shared post has changed before acting on it.
Second-order effects
Twitter’s existing pre-retweet misinformation prompts address amplification at the moment of sharing; an editable post creates pressure to extend safeguards to later revisions and newly added links.
Crypto scammers and phishing operators gain a potential bait-and-switch route if edits are not conspicuous, increasing the value of account security and visible version records for high-reach accounts.
Third-order effects
If editable social posts become standard, platform trust systems will need to evaluate content as a versioned record rather than treating publication as a fixed event, with provenance and change visibility becoming part of distribution safety.
The feature sharpens the trade-off in Twitter’s broader effort to assess whether its service enables abuse, spam, and manipulation: usability improvements can require additional moderation and product controls to preserve context.
The trend: Social platforms are moving toward richer post-publication controls while having to build provenance safeguards that prevent reach earned under one message from being reused for another.
@fmbutt ... FB alerts users if a post is edited (so you go see if fraud occurred). Not many people edit posts on FB. Things are faster/more viral on Twitter though. I agree it can be problematic. Most people wouldn't torch the social capital. Outliers who don't care are the issue…
@mariachong ... I just don't see FBs experience with edit to be comparable to the weaponization that will happen on Twitter. FB is a totally different vibe as the kids say (not about FB because they don't care).
@CaseyNewton ... Editing the names of Facebook Pages/Groups is a common bait & switch troll farm tactic - eg amplifying a political message by turning a cute cat page into right wing propaganda et.
@stevesi ... FB is 10x bigger than Twitter and was used with some success to influence the 2016 election. And editing posts had nothing to do with it! Even Russian troll farms couldn't find a way to make it useful
This is why you should have maybe 30-60 seconds to edit a tweet, not after it has gone viral. Just long enough for you to realize you typed your instead of you're and look like a fucking idiot. https://twitter.com/...
Great coverage by @washingtonpost @WillOremus. The edit button is particularly dangerous on Twitter bc tweets influence markets, nat security, & voting at a faster rate than most tools. We don't need additional disinformation risk ahead of next election. https://www.washingtonpos…
@CaseyNewton Yep. I asked them about this. Because I can see how to exploit the feature as it currently stands and I'm no evil genius. OK, I am, but I'm an evil genius who uses her power for good. No new rules for now, but they are keeping a close eye, I am told.
I agree that disinfo/misinfo fears are a bit overblown, but I also think that people lie and make shit up on every website and if having an edit button is what it takes for people to stop treating tweets like some bastion of objective truth, so be it. https://twitter.com/...
@CaseyNewton Seeing loads of hot takes that ignore the product thinking behind Twitter's approach (duh, because that's more fun). That you'll only get 30m to make a change, and that the tweet was edited will be clearly marked, seem to address many of these concerns. https://twitt…
I doubt the old Tweet edits would be swapped in-place with the new ones There'll just be an indicator that there's a new version of the Tweet. Not entirely sure if the likes/retweets would carry over too https://twitter.com/...
I continue to think these fears are overblown, but Twitter should consider explicitly forbidding using the feature this way, and suspend or ban accounts that do it https://twitter.com/...
With editing now being tried out by @TwitterSupport, I have to modify my policies. 1) No retweeting of accounts I don't know until they are at least 30 minutes old. 2) Additional care in retweeting accounts I trust. One of the virtues of Twitter is its speed. Or used to be.