The Washington Post: Twitter’s Testing a 280-Character Limit for Tweets

Even though Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey denied rumors about a longer character count just last year, the company has made a surprising announcement this week. According to a recent article from The Washington Post, the social network is testing out a feature to let users double the characters allowed in their tweets. Only a small percentage of users will be introduced to the new feature on their accounts.

In a blog post from the company, Twitter explained, “We see that a small percent of tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters (only 0.4%). But in English, a much higher percentage of tweets have 140 characters (9%). Most Japanese tweets are 15 characters while most English tweets are 34.” The new rollout is available for all languages except Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

While the change may seem drastic, the brand has expressed that it is willing to give up one of its differentiators in order to relieve a pain point for users. Twitter has made updates to its usability in the past year to win over new users but this new feature would be its biggest change yet.