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Please No, Twitter.

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8 November 2017

By Alex Khalil

Twitter plans to increase the number of characters in tweets from 140 to 280 for most of its users very soon. This is in response to the criticism that it wasn’t easy enough to tweet, which came about in September.

A test was done with a small group of people, where only 5% sent tweets that were longer than 140 characters and only 2% use more than 190, the site said in a blog post.

Those who did use longer tweets got more followers, more engagement and spent more time on the site. It makes sense, the more you can say, the more interaction, the more engagement.

When the change was announced, many criticised it, pointing out that this is a bit of a non-issue. Instead of fixing the issues the site has with hate crime and bots, it’s making it so those bigots can speak a bit longer.

Lovely. Good job Twitter. Seriously.

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