Bengaluru: Twitter is planning to introduce a new feature that will allow users that are potentially posting offensive tweets to reconsider the post. The company is planning to give the users a second chance to self-edit their tweets and replies if they contain harmful, abusive and hate content, before they post.
If the user still plans on posting, the tweet will be subject to scrutiny according to Twitter’s policies. This new self-edit feature is put in place to curb the spread of hate speech on the platform which has been a problem for the social networking giant. When things get heated, you may say things you don’t mean. To let you rethink a reply, we’re running a limited experiment on iOS with a prompt that gives you the option to revise your reply before it’s published if it uses language that could be harmful, tweeted Twitter Support.
Twitter claims this is a limited experiment and is currently only available for iOS users. The new message will pop up on tweets which carry harmful content and Twitter AI/ML tools will try to catch such hate words first-hand. There has been a demand from Twitter users to introduce a feature to edit tweets but so far, there’s been no change in that regard.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey first addressed the possibility of adding an edit feature for tweets in December 2016, based on the suggestions. Back in 2018, while visiting India for Twitter’s pre-election campaign, Dorsey was quizzed why Twitter does not have an edit button. To which, he said, “the reason Twitter does not have an ‘edit’ button is because people may change their opinions by editing the original tweet and then people who don’t agree with the original view, may have already retweeted the tweet, which is not an accurate representation of what they believe.”
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