Bigger tweets:

Aiming to ease communication on the platform, Twitter plans to test a format doubling the size of its signature 140-character messages.

A relic of a time when tweets had to fit within a text message, 140-character tweets have become Twitter’s most enduring and defining trait.

But like those old-fashioned cell-phone-delivered text messages, Twitter’s terseness may soon become a forgotten aspect of technology past.

Twitter announced Tuesday that the company plans to test longer tweet formats — doubling the character count of the messages its users can post from 140 characters (the length of this story’s first two sentences) to 280 characters.

The impetus for this change, Twitter said, was to make it easier for people to express themselves without worrying about hitting a virtual wall.

Twitter, which has about 328 million monthly users, has long struggled to show the kind of

breakout growth rivals like Snapchat and Instagram have seen. Experts have attributed that in part to nonusers failing to understand the utility of the social network and casual users being turned off by its idiosyncrasies.

“When people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people tweeting,” Aliza Rosen, Twitter’s product manager wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

Rosen’s blog post, at about 2,680 characters, would have taken 20 tweets to convey. If Twitter’s new character count limit goes through, however, it could have been released in 10.

The longer 280-character limitation is being tested among a small group that tweets in languages where the company’s character count seems to pose a routine problem, Rosen wrote.

According to the company, 9 percent of all tweets in English hit the 140-character limit, whereas less than half a percent of tweets in Japanese do.

“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),” she wrote.

The announcement appears to be an extension of several moves Twitter has made over the past year to make tweeting easier by changing the way characters are counted in each tweet: Photos, videos and animated images known as GIFs are no longer factored into a tweet’s overall character count. Similarly, replying to other users by their handle no longer cuts into a tweet’s length.

Amid these changes last year, CEO Jack Dorsey promised Twitter loyalists affronted by the prospect of longer tweets that the 140-character count was “staying.”

“It’s a good constraint for us,” Dorsey said in an interview on the “Today” show in March 2016.

That sentiment — and fear of alienating Twitter’s most hard-core users, many of whom have loudly defended the social network’s 140character limit — had previously held Twitter’s engineers back from altering the limit.

In its blog post on Tuesday, the company attempted to head off the outrage it routinely receives whenever an unpopular change is made to its product.

“We understand since many of you have been tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters — we felt it, too,” Rosen wrote. “But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint.”

Initially, Twitter said, a small group of users would test out the new space constraints while the company studied their behavior and use of the longer length.

The testers would be randomly selected, according to the tech company. It was not immediately clear when or if the company would roll out its 280 character limits to a broader audience or to what extent the company may handpick users in the future to whom Twitter may allot more space.

“Twitter is about brevity,” Rosen wrote in the company’s blog post. “It’s what makes it such a great way to see what’s happening . ... That is something we will never change.”

On other matters, Twitter is holding fast to its rules. On Monday, Twitter revealed that certain users who are considered “newsworthy,” like President Trump, are treated differently and allowed more leeway than everyday Twitter users.

Trump, who often reveals his feelings in passionate mini-missives on Twitter and has used the social network to announce policy decisions, has not been suspended or removed from the platform — despite calls for him to be dropped for violating Twitter’s user guidelines forbidding abuse and threats of violence, among other things — because of the newsworthiness of his words.

“This has long been internal policy and we’ll soon update our publicfacing rules to reflect it,” Twitter’s official public policy account tweeted on Monday.

It made the announcement in six 140-character tweets.