Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, has confirmed that the platform will increase its character limit from the current 140 to 10,000 “soon”, and it will include “simple formatting tools”. The announcement was made in a tweet in which he responded to a user complimenting the plans for a significantly longer character count. While no specific release date has been given, Musk previously mentioned on March 6 that the limit would be coming “soon”.
The increased character limit would allow users to express themselves better in one tweet instead of sending out a series of tweets. For businesses, this would be helpful in promoting themselves with more detail. The move would also enable Twitter to compete with other social media platforms that offer more capacity for posts. For instance, Facebook offers a character limit of 63,206, while it’s WhatsApp messaging service allows for up to 65,536 characters.
The idea of expanding Twitter’s character limit to 10,000 was first floated in January 2016 by a technology news site, but Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey denied the report. However, he hinted that the company had not ruled out the possibility of increasing its character count.
Since Musk took over as CEO of Twitter in October 2022, he has made several changes to streamline operations, cut costs, and boost profitability. He is also attempting to make the platform more transparent by making Twitter’s algorithm open source. In addition, the algorithm for recommending tweets will be made public on March 31, using artificial intelligence to curb the manipulation of public opinion on the platform.