Elon Musk to introduce 4,000-character tweets next month

Elon Musk has announced that Twitter will introduce 4,000-character tweets early next month.

Musk, who became CEO of the social media platform in October 2022, confirmed rumours of the increase last month.

Users can currently share posts with a maximum of 280 characters. The previous limit was 140, which was then doubled in 2017.

In a recent reply Musk said that the longer-form tweets “will get the same Timeline screen space as other tweets, but you will be able to click for more”.

He continued: “We will also be adding simple formatting features like bold, underline & font size later this quarter.

“The goal is to allow people to publish long-form natively on Twitter, rather than forcing them to use another website. Twitter will continue to recommend brevity in tweets.”

Some users have criticised the decision to significantly increase the character limit, arguing that the brevity of tweets is what sets Twitter apart from other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

People are able to share longer messages through the site’s current threads function, which may well disappear after 4,000-character tweets are introduced.

We will also be adding simple formatting features like bold, underline & font size later this quarter.

The goal is to allow people to publish long-form natively on Twitter, rather than forcing them to use another website.

Twitter will continue to recommend brevity in tweets.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 9, 2023

Other recent changes at Twitter under Musk include a new view count feature, a revamped Twitter Blue subscription package, and an overhaul of the verified badge system for public figures, government accounts and companies.

The latter came after earlier plans for the verification system were scrapped due to a flood of impostor accounts appearing on the site. Under that iteration, Twitter Blue users could pay $7.99 (£6.61) a month for a blue tick – meaning that their profiles were indistinguishable from existing legitimate pages.

Late last month thousands of people reported technical issues while using Twitter to which Musk responded: “Works for me.”

During his time as CEO of Twitter, Musk has banned and then unbanned several journalists who wrote about him, stopped the platform’s COVID misinformation policy, and seen the use of antisemitic, homophobic, racist and transphobic language on the platform spike.

Immediately after his takeover Musk fired several top executives at Twitter and half of its workforce. The layoffs reportedly gutted teams that covered human rights, machine learning ethics, curation, communications, accessibility and moderation.

In other news, Musk has broken the world record for the “largest loss of personal fortune in history”, with his net worth having recently dropped by more than $200billion (£166billion).

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