Doom moves on Twitter may take longer.
Elon Musk, over the weekend, seemed to indicate that the social media company is preparing to increase the character limit from 280 characters to 4,000, a 14-fold increase from the current maximum.
The potential change arose when one user asked Musk if it was true that Twitter was set to increase characters from 280 to 4000. Musk, succinctly, answered “yes”.
Of course, Musk doesn’t always mean what he says on Twitter. And even if he did, his plan on the website was erratic so far and continuously may change.
However, Musk has long expressed a desire to increase Twitter’s number of characters. At the end of November, he appeared to be leaning towards the 1,000 character count limit, telling one user who asked about the change “that’s what to do [sic] list“
Part of the reason for that desire can be found in his own history. In April, a judge ruled that one of Musk’s 2018 tweets about privatizing his company was a lie. That thwarted Musk’s attempt to scrap a settlement with the SEC that he agreed to in 2018 that required him to get approval before tweeting about it. Tesla.
In one appeal that rulinghe pointed to the character limit as part of the problem, saying that the judge “parsed the individual phrases of the different tweets and pointed out some other information that should accompany the tweets, although the short form Twitter media limits the number of characters per tweet.”
Part of Twitter’s appeal to many users is its imperative brevity. The last company increase its character count in 2017going from 140 to 280.
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