Twitter Forgoing 140-Character Limit

On September 26, Twitter began testing out 280-character tweets, thereby doubling its existing character limit. The unexpected move, officially announced in joint blog post by Product Manager Alisa Rosen and Senior Software Engineer Ikuhiro Ihara, namely stems from a desire to help users express themselves more easily, without having to let go of words that would’ve otherwise conveyed an important meaning or emotion to them. Interestingly, this common problem across most languages including English, Spanish and French is far less common in Japanese, Korean or Chinese for instance, which allow speakers to almost double the amount of information conveyed through one character. “We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re doing something new: we’re going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean),” the blog post reads. And while the update is only available to select accounts at this point, it has already been met with mixed reactions from Twitter users, many of whom remain emotionally attached to the platform’s signature 140-character limit.