Elon Musk says Twitter will roll out long-form tweets in early February

The billionaire owner is planning to overhaul the social media platform's user interface

Twitter, which was bought by Elon Musk in a $44 billion deal last year, has faced a tumultuous time as the billionaire looks to revamp the loss-making platform. Reuters

Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has said that long-form tweets will be introduced on the social media platform in early February.

This is part of a “much larger” user interface overhaul, Mr Musk said in a tweet on Sunday.

“Easy swipe right/left to move between recommended vs followed tweets rolls out later this week," said Mr Musk, who is also the chief executive of electric carmaker Tesla.

"First part of a much larger UI overhaul. Bookmark button (de facto silent like) on Tweet details rolls out a week later. Long form tweets early Feb.”

Twitter, which was bought by Mr Musk in a $44 billion deal last year, has faced a tumultuous time as the billionaire looks to revamp the loss-making platform.

Twitter has made deeper cuts into its already diminished trust and safety team that handles global content moderation, as well as to the unit related to hate speech and harassment, Bloomberg has reported.

At least a dozen more cuts on Friday night affected workers in the company’s Dublin and Singapore offices, it said.

They included Nur Azhar bin Ayob, the head of site integrity for Twitter’s Asia-Pacific region, a relatively recent hire, and Analuisa Dominguez, Twitter’s senior director of revenue policy.

Since Mr Musk’s takeover in October, he warned that Twitter is at risk of bankruptcy and instituted what he called a “hardcore” work environment after a drastic cutback in staff.

In less than three months, he has spooked advertisers, alienated some of Twitter’s most ardent creators and turned the service into a trending topic in itself.

Last month, the top privacy regulator in the EU opened an investigation into reports of a suspected data breach at Twitter that compromised the personal details of 5.4 million users in 2021.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said it decided to start a probe under its own initiative, over reports that one or more data sets of Twitter users' personal information “had been made available on the internet”.

While the suspected breaches came before the billionaire’s purchase, key roles policing compliance with regulations have been eliminated, sparking concerns about the social media giant’s ability to protect user data.

Last week, Israel-based cyber intelligence company Hudson Rock said that a Twitter database containing about 235 million users had been exposed on an online hacker forum.