This is how edited tweets might look when embedded elsewhere

While Twitter hasn’t officially released its much-anticipated edit tweet feature yet, one lingering question has been how they would look as embeds on other sites. Would they dynamically change when edited on Twitter, or would they remain as they were when created? OR would Twitter introduce something radical alongside or instead of either of those options? Given how often tweets get embedded elsewhere, the answer to this question takes on nearly philosophical proportions.

Well, we now have an idea about how edited tweets might look like when a site embeds them, thanks to app researcher Jane Manchun Wong.

According to screenshots she posted this week, embedded tweets will have markers indicating if the author has edited the tweet after the site posted it, keeping the original text intact.

Wong presented a couple of scenarios about how embeds and the edit tweet function will work with each other. The first scenario shows a site embedding an already-edited tweet with the timestamp of the last edit. The second scenario shows a tweet that’s been edited after the site embedded it; the original version will show a “There’s a new version of the tweet” label under the edited tweet with a link to redirect readers to the latest version — on Twitter itself.

Embedded Tweets will show whether it’s been edited, or whether there’s a new version of the Tweet

When a site embeds a Tweet and it gets edited, the embed doesn’t just show the new version (replacing the old one). Instead, it shows an indicator there’s a new version pic.twitter.com/mAz5tOiyOl

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) August 1, 2022

Embeds are important because they give users a chance to interact with Twitter even if they are not registered on the site. Plus, a lot of news reports rely on tweets, and if the content represented in a tweet changes, it might affect the whole story. Twitter has struggled with the formatting of embedded tweets that were removed after they were posted on a site. Earlier this year, it started showing a blank tweet embed box instead of blockquote when an embedded tweet was removed. The company said this change was to respect the author’s wish to remove, and it is working on showing a better message instead of a blank box for deleted tweets.

Hey Kevin! We’re doing this to better respect when people have chosen to delete their Tweets. Very soon it’ll have better messaging that explains why the content is no longer available 🙂 my DMs are open if you’d like to chat more about this

— Eleanor Harding (@tweetanor) March 29, 2022

This would be helpful for news sites, giving them a trail, and a record, of what an account or a person originally said even if the tweet is edited later.

Regardless of how embedded tweets might look, in another edit tweet-related find, reverse engineer Nima Owji discovered that Twitter appears to be working on limited functionality for …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/this-is-how-edited-tweets-might-look-when-embedded-elsewhere/