Twitter May Give All Users 280 Characters In Next Few Days

On Tuesday, Politico posted a hunch as part of its Playbook Power Briefing that all Twitter users were on track to get an upped character count sometime soon.

Select users on the social media site were granted 280 characters per tweet back in September and now the site is reportedly looking to expand that privilege to all users. Politico reported that “political operatives” had “caught wind of the change” on Tuesday.

As of Tuesday, some users had 280 characters at their disposal, but most were still working with just 140 to craft their tweets and ideas. The decision was made to allow for better expression on the side a post from Twitter said in a blog post in September. That blog post was accompanied by a post from Twitter CEO and co-founder, Jack Dorsey.

The roughly month-long trial period was meant to ensure that the increase in character allowance was a good fit for the side and worked well for the Twitter community, said the post. Assuming Twitter has deemed the increase a good tool for the community, it could start rolling out soon to all users.

The original 280 character announcement was met with some criticism from users, something that hasn’t changed much in the last month. On Tuesday users were taking to the platform to plead with their followers to not use the 280 characters for every tweet, even when they are granted with double what they’re used to. Other users were asking Twitter to not grant their followers the 280.

Other people were saying that they didn’t even read the entirety of 280 character tweets.

While others said with the change, the site would be too much like Facebook.

Some users had already found a way to get 280 characters even if the site hadn’t granted it to them. This is thanks to a userscript in Chrome that allowed users to access the double character limit and use it for any tweet they send while running the script. Even though this trick has made its rounds in the last month, many people still choose not to have 280 characters.

As of Tuesday at 3 p.m. EDT Twitter had not released an official statement on the change.

Update 3:42 p.m. EDT: "We have nothing new to share at this time about our 280 character limit test. We are continuing to watch, learn, and observe how this test impacts the service," a Twitter spokesperson told International Business Times.