Twitter Doubles Character Limit To 280

Tuesday evening Twitter announced it will expand the character limit for some users to 280 characters, that's double the traditional 140. The change was announced on the Twitter blog written by a product manager and a senior software engineer with the company.

“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),” said the post.

The new limit is currently only available to a "small group" of users. Jack Dorsey, the CEO and co-founder of Twitter, is one of those select users who can access the new limit. He used it Tuesday to explain the reasoning behind the change, and said that the original limit was an “arbitrary choice.”

The change was driven by data, Twitter said. The company found that nine percent of tweets in English have 140 characters, the limit. While less than one percent of Tweets in Japanese hit the limit. "Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese," said the blog post.

The reason for trying the change out on a small group of users before releasing it platform wide is to ensure that it will work best for the community, said the post.

Some users had already been getting around this limit by using TwitLonger, a site that allowed users to type their Tweets into the site and then would automatically post a link to that Tweet to their Twitter feed. Others opted to simply type out their long messages to their followers in a note on their phone and post a photo of it in lieu of a text Tweet. Some resorted to compiling threads of multiple Tweets strung together until they completed their thought. These tactics might become less common on the app if the 280 character limit is expanded to the full community of users.

Unsurprisingly, after the change was announced Tuesday users immediately started Tweeting about it.

Chrissy Teigan was of course on top of the new change to the platform.

Users couldn’t help but make jokes about the change too.

Many users were upset that of all the changes the company could make to the platform to make it a safer place, it instead decided to increase the character limit.

Others really just still want the ability to edit their Tweets, something Twitter has long held out on.

Other users were upset that of all the changes the company could make to the platform to make it a safer place for users, it chose to alter the character limit.

Twitter began a campaign to make the platform a safer place for its users back in January and six months later gave an update on whether or not the changes to the platform had any success. The general manager of consumer product and engineering said that while there was still more work to do, there was “significantly less abuse” on the social media. While some users still want stronger repercussions for abusive accounts on the site it seems they’ll have to wait.