Will Facebook one day give you the ability to edit your status updates? The quick and easy answer: It seems likely, yes. The answers to the more complicated questions of exactly how and when this might happen are less clear.
At a journalism conference this week, a Facebook program manager reportedly implied — or provided enough of a hint publicly that others inferred — that the ability to edit status posts is forthcoming. A New York Times reporter in attendance sent the following tweet, quoting Vadim Lavrusik, who runs Facebook's journalism program (Disclosure: Lavrusik is a former Mashable employee.):
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@lavrusik: "You can edit comments and captions. You can infer what we will do next." Possible new feature to edit statuses?#UNITY12— Aaron Edwards (@aaronmedwards) August 2, 2012
According to the Los Angeles Times, Lavrusik also said, "I can tell you that users have asked for [the ability to edit statuses] a lot, and a lot of times that's how we develop things."
When I asked Lavrusik about it, he declined to comment, but reiterated a statement from the social network's public relations team: Facebook might consider a feature that would let users edit their published status updates, but so far has nothing to announce.
As someone who fairly regularly posts to a Facebook brand page with a dizzying number of fans, and as a journalist in favor of transparency, I can understand the various considerations at play. I find it nearly panic-inducing posting to Mashable's Facebook page. Did I spell everything correctly? Is this the correct URL to share? Is the URL shortened? Does the formatting look OK? Did I mention the correct Facebook Page — did I even remember to? Does this need an image credit? These are all questions I have to answer before posting to Facebook, because I know I won't have the chance to change it.
Compare that to writing a story for Mashable — maybe even this story. There are at least as many questions I have to answer. But at least if a typo gets through, I can go back and correct it. If there's a factual error, I can correct that too. And to be transparent to readers (a basic tenet of journalism), I'd include a correction in the story, maybe even tweet the story again from Mashable's accounts to point out the error to readers.
"Admit mistakes and correct them promptly," says the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics. Right now, my only option for admitting a mistake on Facebook and correcting it is to add a comment to the post — which might get buried or completely lost when other users re-share the post. My other option: Delete the post completely and maybe (if I want to experience the wrath of Facebook users when you share the same post twice) publish a new status update that includes an official correction.
As Facebook moves toward being a content platform, able to host longer posts, and urges journalists to use it, it should also make sure to provide features that let us embrace the basic principles of journalism: Admit mistakes and correct them promptly. And this feature to edit posts must itself be transparent.
Google+ gets close. It does at least offer the ability to edit posts. When a post is altered, it clearly states the time at which it was edited at the top. But it doesn't show a history of the edits. I edited the post below to change "cellphone" from one word to two. You can see that it was edited, but not how.
What I would love to see, though, is if you click on the time the post was just changed, you could see the earlier version. And maybe whatever was changed would have a subtle dotted line underneath, indicating it had been altered. Any tool for editing published content should have a transparent way of showing what was changed and how it was changed.
As a former Facebook engineer pointed out on Quora, letting people edit posts could lead to abuse. "Like, I could make a post that says 'Who likes ice cream?' and once 20 of my friends say 'I do!' I could then change it to say 'Who likes gay sex?' Not that there's anything wrong with that, but a lot of people would still be put off," Yishan Wong wrote.
He compared Facebook posts to real-life conversations. You can't take back what you said. But that's not a perfect analogy. You can apologize in person. On Facebook, you can delete a thread and post completely (or at least try, before re-shares spread across the network), but it's impossible to take back the spoken word. The closest you can get is an apology or explanation or excuse.
From my perspective as a journalist and editor, I have to treat my published words — whether here on Mashable or Facebook or elsewhere on the web — as permanent as if they were printed in a newspaper. The web might be more dynamic, but with the shareable nature of online content today, once your words are published, they are permanent. For example, no matter how grievous the error or incorrect the story, I could never support removing it completely from this site. For one, because it'd be nearly impossible — the story would exist in other forms, in Google's cache, as a headline on Twitter or re-shares on Facebook that would then link to an error page. For another, it would go against my ethics as a journalist of being transparent and accountable.
I could and would, though, let the story live and provide a correction, apology or explanation.
Whether journalist, publication, brand or individual, we all make mistakes. We all need the chance to correct them.
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