Many have long begged Twitter to allow them to edit their tweets, but Twitter has pushed back on the idea. However, it seems that Twitter could have some kind of alternative in the works in the form of an undo timer. This basically allows users to recall a tweet after they post it, assuming it was done in the timeframe that they were given.
This feature was discovered by researcher Jane Manchun Wong who shared the information on her Twitter page. At the moment, not much is known about how this undo feature will work, and more importantly, what’s the difference between this and users manually deleting a tweet that they just posted.
Twitter is working on “Undo Send” timer for tweets pic.twitter.com/nS0kuijPK0
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) March 5, 2021
Since Twitter is essentially microblogging, posting a tweet and deleting it after is the same as you would a blog post, so it’s hard to see what the differences are right now. However, it is possible that once you hit the post button, your tweet won’t actually go live until the undo timer has run its course, after which the tweet will be publicized and users will have to delete it to take it down.
The main difference is that a tweet that hasn’t been published won’t get seen by others, which means there are no screenshots and basically no proof that the post was ever made. This is versus a tweet that has been published but later deleted, in which some might have saved the tweet for posterity. Either way, the undo feature isn’t available to everyone right now so we’ll have to wait and see how exactly this feature works.
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