Twitter’s window to edit tweets is now one hour, but you still have to pay for it

Twitter’s window to edit tweets is now one hour, but you still have to pay for it

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

When Twitter finally added its long-awaited edit button last fall, it limited the feature to Twitter Blue subscribers and only allowed changes on original tweets (not replies) within 30 minutes of the post, but now that’s changing.

The official Twitter Blue account now says that the tweet editing window has been doubled to one hour. The post announcing the feature was edited moments after it went live to note the change but, confusingly, didn’t add any other edits past the thirty-minute mark to demonstrate.

Blue subscribers now have up to 1 hour to edit their Tweets.

— Twitter Blue (@TwitterBlue) June 7, 2023

Twitter’s editing perk for Blue subscribers package arrived after Elon Musk said he would buy Twitter, but well before he actually did. Even after Elon’s revamp of Blue and the installation of new CEO Linda Yaccarino on Monday, it’s still one of the features highlighted in the subscription that also gets paying users access to a blue verified checkmark label, among other things like writing posts with up to 4,000 characters.

Twitter’s support page for Blue was updated shortly after the post went up to reflect the new one-hour time limit. After the feature went live in the US last fall, my colleague David Pierce wrote that “Twitter is being as careful as can be on this one, and seems to have landed in the right place.” So far, the availability of editing hasn’t been a source for major issues that I’ve seen, and direct access to the history of edited tweets generally makes changes easy to spot.

However, as Alex Heath wrote in his Command Line newsletter, Blue signups have been slow, and in replies to the @TwitterBlue tweet, many blue-checked tweeters complain that various parts of the package aren’t working for them. At the same time, reduced ads is a feature that has been advertised as a feature of Blue since its November relaunch and still hasn’t rolled out — according to the support page, “we are working on a feature that will reduce the number of ads you see.”

Of course, some people are still waiting for the ad revenue split Elon Musk promised in February that never seemed to arrive. Concerning that split, in a recent interview, Musk said that not only is it still in the works, but it will also be backdated to his original announcement with “some reasonable revenue share.”

That’s a complicated promise from a company named in many recent reports about not paying its rent and other promised fees. Twitter (or X, depending on who you ask) is also now worth only one-third of the price Musk paid for it last year, and reportedly ad sales for five weeks this spring were reportedly down 59 percent from the same period last year.