Elon Musk says Twitter's 10,000 character limit will come with 'simple formatting tools'

It will allow users to post lengthier tweets, enabling them to express themselves better in one go

Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, has been made major changes at Twitter since he took over late last year. AFP

Twitter chief executive Elon Musk has repeated that the microblogging platform will be increasing its character limit to 10,000 “soon”, and it will come with “simple formatting tools”.

Mr Musk, who bought the San Francisco-based company for $44 billion in October, hinted again at the potentially major update in a tweet on Tuesday, responding to a user who had complimented the plans for the significantly longer character count.

Mr Musk did not elaborate nor give a specific time frame for its release. He had said in a March 6 tweet that the 10,000 character limit was coming, also stating at the time that it would be “soon”.

Twitter, which has used a 140-character limit since it started in 2006, had yet to respond to an email request for comment from The National.

Allowing users to send out lengthier tweets would enable them to express themselves better in one go instead of sending out a series of tweets.

For businesses, it would help them promote themselves with more detail.

It would also allow Twitter to compete with other platforms that offer more capacity for posts. Facebook, the world's biggest social media network, owned by Meta Platforms, offers a significantly more generous character limit of 63,206.

Meta's Instagram has a character limit of 2,200 for its captions, while its WhatsApp messaging service has 65,536, with its group description alone allowing for up to 2,048 characters.

Google's YouTube gives users up to 5,000 characters for its video descriptions while Telegram, the messaging app by Russian developer Pavel Durov that gained prominence during a WhatsApp disruption in 2021, allows 4,096 characters.

The idea of Twitter expanding its character limit to 10,000 was first floated in January 2016, after a report from technology news site Re/Code said the company was exploring plans to introduce this, citing sources.

However, Twitter founder and former chief executive Jack Dorsey denied the Re/Code post. He did not directly address the report but hinted that the company had not ruled out the possibility of increasing its character count.

Mr Musk has made major changes at Twitter ever since he took over late last year in an effort to streamline operations, cut costs and boost its profitability.

He is also attempting to make the platform more transparent by making Twitter's algorithm open source.

Twitter will this month make the algorithm for recommending tweets public on March 31, Mr Musk said. It will use artificial intelligence to curb the manipulation of public opinion on the platform.

However, his time at the helm has also been tumultuous. He has fired more than half of the company's employees and shut down units and offices globally after he acquired it in October, raising concerns that there may not be enough people to carry out oversight roles in key areas of its operations.

Twitter's revenue and adjusted earnings plunged by 40 per cent on an annual basis in December as several advertisers withdrew after Mr Musk took charge of the company, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.

In Twitter's last financial report before its acquisition, the company swung to a net loss of more than $270 million in the second quarter of 2022, compared with a net income of about $65.6 million in the same period a year earlier.

Twitter is also moving forward with plans to introduce a payments feature on its platform, steering it towards Mr Musk's plans to tap into new revenue streams, the Financial Times reported in January.