The only way to edit a tweet is to delete it and write a new one.
Copy the original text and any images.
Delete the original tweet
Paste your text into a new tweet and make the changes you want before publishing it
How to edit tweets on Twitter
The just-delete-it-and-tweet-it-again approach is a hassle if you're dealing with Twitter threads. If you want to "edit" a thread with 20 tweets, you have to repeat the process above for every tweet in the thread. Deleting the first tweet will not delete the whole thread
I'm working on a tool that reduces the hassle around just-delete-it-and-tweet-it-again approach when dealing with threads. Chirr App handles deleting all the original tweets and replacing them with new tweets in one go.
The drawback here is you lose any likes or comments on the original tweets, the new ones don't appear in the same chronological position as before. Even worse, when it's an important tweet and people have linked to it, deleting the original means those links stop working.
In most cases this fine, most people just want to edit tweets because of silly typos.
Sometimes it's more serious than typos. In 2016, 5 police officers were shot in Dallas. The police department tweeted out a picture of a “suspect” and asked the public to help find him. 40,000 retweets later it turns out the man was innocent and the police deleted the tweet.
Deleting the tweet did nothing to stop the spread of damaging information. Editing the original would have let the police correct the record, explain and apologize. The clarification would then be syndicated to all of the news outlets that linked to the original tweet.
In 2015, Twitter's head of product said "There are real challenges to editing tweets after you post them,". Editing tweets would let people to change the meaning of a tweet after the fact. People might retweet a benign tweet only to find out they're now promoting hate speech.
There were rumours that the team was working on an editing feature way back in 2013. In early 2020 Jack talked about editing in a Wired interview and ended with "...we'll probably never do it."
Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey Answers Twitter Questions From Twitter
What is Chirr App?
Chirr App is a tool that helps experts and teams regularly write and schedule Twitter threads. If the people you want to reach are on Twitter, threads are an effective way to establish your expertise in an industry.