If you’ve logged onto Twitter this morning you’ve probably been bombarded with tweets that look a little more like essays. The social media platform is currently trialling 280-character tweets, which is double the original 140-character limit. Although it saves having to remove every little bit of punctuation and correct grammar just to cram your thoughts in, do we really need 280-characters for a tweet? And more importantly, do we even care?
Twitter has been toying with the idea of an increased character limit for the past couple of years when they realised that not all languages can express their thoughts in just 140 characters. For those tweeting in Japanese, Chinese and Korean, hardly any characters are used due to the nature of the language. However, the good old English language was a cause for concern as the majority of tweets written in English seemed to hit the 140-character limit.
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Don’t get me wrong, it could turn out to be a great feature. We say farewell to the days of agonisingly long threads, grammar-less tweets and that annoying reduction in characters that occurs as soon as you attach a picture. But honestly? We probably would’ve been completely fine without the update.
What seems to concern people is that Twitter is showing more interest in character limits instead of focusing on the real issues like the fight against cyber-bullying. But Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey seems to think it’s a great idea, and announced it to the world this morning via, you guessed it, a longer tweet. Dorsey’s suggestion that Twitter has maintained their brevity through a character limit increase is, however, slightly ironic.
The question is, can it make Twitter relevant again? Gone are the days where I felt I had to tweet my opinion on every damn thing, and for a certain generation, Twitter seems to be a dying brand that’s solely used for a quick update on what’s going on or the odd laugh. Introducing a further 140 characters allows us to express our opinions a lot more thoroughly, but also gives a bigger platform for trolls and bullies without protection for those in their firing line.
Only time will tell whether the additional characters improve the quality of tweets, or whether anyone actually gives a shit. Allegedly Twitter once considered upping the limit to 10,000 characters, so let’s just be grateful that idea never made it because, honestly, how on earth would we cope with extra-long Trump tweets?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.