Twitter to test longed-for edit button
SAN FRANCISCO, United States — Twitter announced Tuesday it will soon start experimenting with an edit button, but only on its monthly subscription service at first.
The inability to tweak tweets after firing them off has been a key complaint among users of the one-to-many messaging platform.
Word that the company would start testing an edit feature on Twitter Blue came after newly-named board member Elon Musk conducted an online poll.
In a tweet, Musk asked if people wanted an edit button at Twitter. Nearly 4.4 million votes were cast, some 73 percent of them saying "yes."
"Now that everyone is asking... yes, we've been working on an edit feature since last year," Twitter posted on its communications account.
"No, we didn’t get the idea from a poll," it added, poking fun at the Tesla boss.
According to Jay Sullivan, the company's head of consumer product, "Edit" has been the most requested Twitter feature "for many years."
"People want to be able to fix (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes, typos and hot takes in the moment. They currently work around this by deleting and tweeting again," Sullivan said in a tweet-thread.
The San Francisco-based internet firm said it will kick off testing in coming months to figure out what works when it comes to letting users tinker with posts after they have gone live.
Twitter Blue lets people pay a monthly subscription fee of $3 to access special content or features.
Blue is available on the Twitter application for Apple or Android smartphones in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, according to the company.
Twitter also announced Tuesday that Musk will join its board, boosting hopes the eccentric entrepreneur will lift the social media company's prospects -- although some observers expressed wariness of the billionaire's influence.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal called Musk "a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need," while Musk said he looked forward to soon making "significant improvements to Twitter."
Musk, who also leads the SpaceX venture and is the world's richest man, on Monday had announced his purchase of 73.5 million Twitter shares, or 9.2 percent of the company's common stock.
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter who stepped down as CEO last year, had long opposed an "edit" button on the basis that users could change a tweet that had already been widely shared, changing its meaning or context.
Sullivan addressed those concerns in his posts.
"Without things like time limits, controls, and transparency about what has been edited, Edit could be misused to alter the record of the public conversation," he said, adding that that company's top priority is "protecting the integrity of that public conversation."
He noted that "it will take time" to develop the "Edit" feature and the company will be "actively seeking input and adversarial thinking" in advance of its launch.
Bookmark this page for updates on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms. Main image from by geralt from Pixabay
Mexican authorities are warning about the dangers of a viral TikTok challenge that has left school students intoxicated after taking a controlled medication.
With the slogan "The last one to fall asleep wins," the challenge consists of trying to stay awake after taking clonazepam, a drug used to treat seizures, panic attacks and anxiety.
A side effect of the drug is drowsiness. — AFP
According to tracking sites Downdetector.com and Netblocks, thousands of Twitter users reported an outage on Wednesday, but the issue appeared to be resolving, with error messages and missing tweets reappearing.
At the peak of the outage, at about 0035 GMT, DownDetector says more than 10,000 people reported problems with the platform, which is now owned by the mercurial billionaire Elon Musk.
AFP journalists in the United States and Asia were among those experiencing difficulties. — AFP
Chinese regulators approve 44 new foreign video game titles Wednesday, the first to be allowed to hit the market since an industry crackdown to rein in minors' gaming habits swept the sector last year.
Beijing moved against the country's vibrant gaming sector last August as part of a sprawling crackdown on big tech companies, including a cap on the amount of time children could spend playing games.
Officials also froze approvals of new titles for nine months until April, but a growing number of domestic titles have been approved since then.
China's gaming regulator, the National Press and Publication Administration, on Wednesday said it had approved 44 new imported games in December including Nintendo's Pokemon Unite. -- AFP
Chinese tech giant ByteDance says its employees of Chinese tech giant ByteDance improperly accessed data from social media platform TikTok to track journalists in a bid to identify the source of leaks to the media.
TikTok has gone to great lengths to convince customers and governments of major markets like the United States that users' data privacy is protected and that it poses no threat to national security.
But parent company ByteDance told AFP on Friday that several staffers accessed two journalists' data as part of an internal probe into leaks of company information to the media.
They had hoped to identify links between staff and a Financial Times reporter and a former BuzzFeed journalist, an email from ByteDance's general counsel Erich Andersen seen by AFP said.
Both journalists previously reported on the contents of leaked company materials. — AFP
TikTok's Chinese owner denied on Monday setting up a subsidiary company in Taiwan after the island's authorities said they were investigating the social media app for running "illegal operations".
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), Taiwan's top China policy-making body, said the cabinet had requested a multi-agency investigation during a meeting on security issues posed by TikTok earlier this month.
The case was also forwarded to prosecutors for investigation after a local company allegedly engaged in business activities in Taiwan on behalf of ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent firm, MAC said without elaborating.
Chinese internet and social media platforms are banned from operating businesses in Taiwan under local laws.
ByteDance said on Monday it had no presence in Taiwan. -- AFP
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