Some Twitter users will start being able to click a button on the social media service to edit a tweet after they have posted it. Mor Naaman, professor of information science at Cornell and associate dean at Cornell Tech, researches the trustworthiness of our information ecosystem.
Naaman says: “I am thinking about the edit button’s impact on correcting inadvertent misinformation and misappropriated tweets. In this scenario, a user ‘takes back’ their tweet after an error has been pointed out. For popularly shared tweets, authors keep the original tweet up and reply to it with a correction, which often goes unseen. Editing an original tweet to add a retraction or correction would go a long way. However, the current version of the implementation (allowing 30 minutes for the correction, as reported) does not actually support this. It’s also problematic that it allows people to change the original meaning of their tweets once it spreads. I would rather see a feature that allows tweets to be linked to corrections, retractions, etc.”
-30-
