If you’ve ever said something in a tweet you immediately regretted, Twitter has your back. It’s letting iPhone users test a potential new feature that gives people the opportunity to revise a “harmful” tweet before it’s sent.
The official Twitter Support account said on Wednesday (via Twitter, naturally):
“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.”
This is a feature the social-networking service has been tinkering with for several years. It may be close to widespread deployment, as the company thinks it has a positive impact. “After testing and improving prompts that ask you to review a potentially harmful or offensive reply, we learned that this feature can help encourage more meaningful convos,” Twitter said.
The popup that will be shown to iPhone users now says, “Want to review this before Tweeting? We’re asking people to review replies with potentially harmful or offensive language.”
The example given includes multiple swear words but insults. So Twitter apparently isn’t considering the niceties of etiquette. It’s simply going to ask people if they really want to send texts containing profanity.
This feature won’t be reserved to iPhone for long. The company also said Wednesday, “We’re now rolling out these prompts on iOS and soon Android.”
Not really editable tweets
While a half step in that direction, Wednesday’s change isn’t editable Tweets. The user has pressed the “Tweet” button but the message has not yet been published when the user gets a popup asking if they want to revise their message.
Twitter shows no interest in making tweets editable. In an interview with The Verge in 2020, the topic came up and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said, “We’ll probably never do it.”
