Whether you like it or not, it’s time to break free from the constraints of 140 characters. Twitter announced on Tuesday it’s officially expanding the character limit to 280 for nearly all of its users. Which, in case you were wondering, is just exactly as long as this paragraph.
Twitter decides it’s sticking with this 280-character thing
The company announced Tuesday that the feature would be available to nearly all users.
Photo by Bethany Clarke/Getty Images
Jen Kirby is a senior foreign and national security reporter at Vox, where she covers global instability.
The company’s decision came after a 280-character trial run that began in September among a select few people who mostly protested the change (at least until they started unironically writing long tweets).
Twitter explained in a blog post why it decided to make the tweak permanent:
Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending. With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. Since we saw Tweets hit the character limit less often, we believe people spent less time editing their Tweets in the composer. This shows that more space makes it easier for people to fit thoughts in a Tweet, so they could say what they want to say, and send Tweets faster than before.
The company added that even though the option exists to write 280 characters, most people end up keeping their tweets brief and below 140 characters. (The change won’t apply to Chinese-, Korean-, or Japanese-language users.) But already the expanded limit has come in handy — for making fun of the expanded limit:
Prolific Twitter user President Donald Trump’s refusal to contain his message within the old 140-character limit once led to a harrowing nine-minute pause while officials at the Pentagon feared he was about to start nuclear war:
But it only took Trump a few minutes to send his first 280-character tweet:
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