Twitter Doubles Character Limit to 280

Twitter, the microblogging platform used by everyone from President Donald Trump to your neighbor down the street, announced a major change on Tuesday afternoon: the 140-character limit for tweets, which is almost entirely the source of Twitter's appeal, would be doubled to 280. The change was announced by the @Twitter account.

Can’t fit your Tweet into 140 characters? ??

We’re trying something new with a small group, and increasing the character limit to 280! Excited about the possibilities? Read our blog to find out how it all adds up. ??https://t.co/C6hjsB9nbL
— Twitter (@Twitter) September 26, 2017

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey called this a "small change, but a big move for us," and pointed out that the previous character limit was based off of the then-160 character limit for SMS texts.

This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu
— jack (@jack) September 26, 2017

Co-founder Biz Stone said that the updated limit was an issue of fairness (as languages are different) and that the platform will now be "testing the limits."

Originally, our constraint was 160 (limit of a text) minus username. But we noticed @biz got 1 more than @jack. For fairness, we chose 140. Now texts are unlimited. Also, we realize that 140 isn't fair—there are differences between languages. We're testing the limits. Hello 280!
— Biz Stone (@biz) September 26, 2017