Social media platform Twitter has been around since 2006 and in that time, it has become known for a lot of things. It's character limit, (which increased from 140 to 280 in 2017) hashtags, trending topics, and perhaps the most infuriating, the fact that Twitter does not allow it's users to edit their previously posted tweets.

Unlike the character maximum, that hasn't changed. And while the platform continues to be critiqued for it's handling (or lack thereof) of white nationalist activity on it's platform, they, along with everyone else, are not capable of editing their tweets.And while, you can certainly delete a tweet for any reason, you can't edit any pre-existing content.

That's a good thing.

In the past few years, Twitter has become a political headquarters of sorts, especially with President Trump's unprecedented activity on Twitter. I've certainly made a typo on a tweet and then deleted the guilty tweet in order to hide my shame. For the average person, it is nothing more than an inconvenience. For the political world, it means that beyond deleting the tweet, any political administration cannot edit their posts with hindsight, and then pretend that was the message that was posted from the beginning.

President Trump has deleted tweets over the course of his presidency, which, the internet has managed to carefully catalogue. We are lucky that we live in a world where we can take screenshots and spread the offending tweet far and wide in a matter of seconds. But, with the rise of fake news and deep fakes it has become even more difficult to figure out what the truth is in a quickly changing world.

Being able to edit your tweets in this world would make it much easier to lie and to gaslight the world. It would be much harder to track changes that are made on any political figures Twitter, but especially on President Trump's twitter, since he is a rather prolific Tweeter. Being forced to deal with the inconvenience of deleting a tweet to edit it, means that either more time is spent ensuring that your tweet is accurate, or leaves inaccurate tweets on the internet.

While the feature has frustrated many, I do not want users to be able to edit their tweets any time soon.