Twitter will allow longer tweets starting on September 19
By Buckie Wells
Twitter, the social media platform known for limiting what its users say per tweet, is changing what counts toward 140 characters and what doesn’t.
Since its launch in 2006, Twitter limited users to 140 characters per tweet. That included letters, numbers, punctuations and spaces. Over the decade, users learned to circumvent this by attaching photos of long messages written in other apps or using a string of consecutive tweets to get their point across.
However, starting on September 19th, this won’t be a problem any longer. According to the Verge, Twitter will stop counting attachments and quoted tweets as part of 140 characters. Basically, this means any photos, GIFS, videos or polls are excluded. Likewise, quoting a tweet (a combination of responding and retweeting) won’t count against a user either.
Additionally, Twitter handles (when you @ someone’s username) will no longer count as part of the 140, but reportedly, that’s only if the handle appears at the beginning of the reply.
The company has considered expanding the character count in the past. Only things like the interface and ‘Moments’ have really seen considerable upgrades. Once Twitter rolls out these improvements and sees how excited people are, they may consider adding more. The competitiveness between social media companies encourages them to make the changes their users want to see. For example, Instagram added the ‘Stories’ feature. It’s the same thing as Snapchat, but Instagram also implemented it into its platform.
That being said, Twitter is known for other things besides the 140 character count. It’s the playground for celebrity feuds and online bullies/Twitter trolls. If Twitter gives users more freedom to throw shade, things could get really out of hand. As if Leslie Jones doesn’t have it bad enough already.
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Hopefully, a 10-year-old company already knows that if you change the way users interact in the space, you need to have the policies to back it up. Plus, we can all do our part to tweet responsibly when Twitter rolls out its update on September 19th.