section_path: Content/Character limit
section_name: Character limit
paragraph_text: Character limit
  
  Tweets originally were limited to 140 characters when the service launched, in 2006. Twitter was originally designed to be used on SMS text messages, which are limited to 160 characters. Twitter reserved 20 characters for the username, leaving 140 characters for the post. The original limit was seen as an iconic fixture of the platform, encouraging "speed and brevity".
  
  Increasing the limit had been a topic of discussion inside the company for years, and had been resurfaced in 2015 for ways to grow the userbase. At the time, internal discussion also involved excluding links and mentions from the character limit. By January 2016, an internal product named "Beyond 140" was in development, targeting Q1 of the same year for expanding tweet limits. By the end of 2015, the company was moving close to introducing a 5,000 or 10,000 character limit. An unfinalized version had tweets that went over the old 140 character threshold only showing the first 140 characters, with a call-to-action that there was more in the tweet. Clicking on the tweet would reveal the rest, which was done to retain the same feel of the timeline.
  
  The change was controversial internally and met with backlash by users. Dorsey confirmed that the 140 character limit would remain, but had told employees upon his return as CEO that the once-sacred aspects of Twitter were no longer untouchable.
  
  In May 2016, a week after being leaked, Twitter announced that media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, quote tweets) nor mentions in replies would no longer increase the character limit to be rolled out later in the year to ready developers. The changes rolled out in September, except for the @replies, which were tested in October and then rolled out in March 2017, a year after the original announcement. These changes were a compromise to internal resistance to a 10,000 character limit from the year before.
  
  On September 26, 2017, Twitter announced the company was testing doubling the character limit—from 140 to 280. It was an effort for users to be more expressive with their tweets, as users were otherwise cramming ideas into a single tweet by rewriting and removing vowels, or not tweeting at all. It began testing to a small group of users in all languages, excluding Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, because the three languages can say double the amount of information in one character. According to the company's statistics, 0.4% of tweets in Japanese hit the 140 character ceiling, while 9% of tweets in English hit the ceiling. Users not in the test group were able to see and interact with them normally.
  
  The change was similarly controversial internally as the 10,000 character limit proposal. The immediate reaction by Twitter users was largely negative.