Twitter massively expands tweet character limit to Blue subscribers

Twitter keeps experimenting – the social media platform has announced it will let you post tweets with a maximum of 4,000 characters. The caveat here is that the new feature is only available to the subscribers to the premium Blue tier and only in the US.

What makes a tweet a tweet? The original meaning of the word tells us that it is a short chirp from a bird. Twitter’s former boss Jack Dorsey once said that the definition of the name of the platform was “a short burst of inconsequential information.”

Well, Twitter might have consisted of short chirps when it allowed a mere 140 characters per tweet. When the limit was raised to 280 characters, the posts were still more like fleeting bursts.

But now, the company is literally supersizing the maximum character limit to 4,000 for Twitter Blue subscribers, based in the US.

“Need more than 280 characters to express yourself? We know that lots of you do. And while we love a good thread, sometimes you just want to tweet everything all at once. We get that. So we're introducing longer tweets!” Twitter Blue account posted on Wednesday night.

Only Blue tier members can post longer tweets for now, although any other Twitter subscribers can interact with the messages.

Thankfully, if someone actually decided to post a 4,000-character essay on Twitter, other users will not see the entire supertweet on their timelines. There will be a “show more” button that you can select to view the rest of the tweet.

The obvious consequence should, in theory, be fewer Twitter threads on the platform. Many more philosophical personalities definitely enjoy their lengthy musings but have to break them up into shorter tweets.

But the change actually affects a tiny fraction of Twitter’s 237 million daily active users – that’s because the Blue tier only has less than 300,000 subscribers so far, according to Travis Brown, a researcher who tracks the numbers.

Twitter Blue, chaotically introduced after Elon Musk took over the company last year, is an opt-in, paid subscription that adds a blue checkmark to your account and offers early access to select features. It costs $8 per month for the web or $11 for iOS and Android.

Previously, Twitter Blue also introduced the ability to post 60-minute-long videos. Musk has said that the company wanted bloggers and video creators to post their content on the platform.