After 11 years of 140-character tweets, Twitter decided to double this to 280 characters from November 2017.

Before rolling the change out to the general public, Twitter began trialing this “feature” with a select group of users (Watson 2017), though initial testing suggested that only 5 per cent of the group opted to use over 140 characters in their tweets (Newton 2017). And critics (e.g., Silver 2017) argue that this will drown out Twitter timelines, compromising the platform’s uniquely succinct form of social communication.

Our contemporary use of Twitter – in part a social, political, and economic information network – has evolved over more than a decade. So it may be some years before the impact of the 280-character expansion can be evaluated. Given that our behaviors on all social media platforms are interlinked, it may be that Twitter is answering a call for individuals to express themselves more fully, though in the context of these platforms more broadly, 280 characters is still relatively terse.

Ultimately, if Twitter continues to be viewed as a platform for bursts of communication rather than in-depth, fully formed dialogue, it is likely that the increased character count will not have a substantive change to the platform. Only time will tell if the increased character count impacts significantly on people’s use of Twitter.