Twitter may consider increasing tweet character count from 280 to 420, Elon Musk hints

Twitter has been seeing a lot of changes since Elon Musk bought the company in late October, but its fundamental feature remains the same.

The platform allows users to tweet thoughts and opinions in just 280 characters, and the case has been like this for the last four years. However, it appears that the new Twitter owner may consider increasing the limit in the near future from 280 to 420.

Musk has also said that the platform will show a “general amnesty” towards suspended accounts from next week. It means many celebrities and personalities such as Kangana Ranaut, her sister Rangoli Chandel, and singer Abhijeet Banerjee could return to the bird app soon.

Musk expressed interest in increasing the 280-character count in a tweet over the weekend. A user ‘@rawalerts’ wrote, “Twitter 2.0 should make the character limit 420 instead of that annoying 280.” To which, Musk replied, “Good idea”. In its early days, Twitter tweets were restricted to 140 characters since the service heavily relied on traditional SMS, which had a similar character count per message. Twitter increased the character count from 140 to 280 in 2018.

Musk’s reply may appear dry and safe, but he has been conducting polls and taking users’ feedback on what to add to the platform. Earlier in April, Musk asked users whether they would like to see an ‘Edit tweet’ option, and many replied ‘yes.’

Twitter quickly rolled out a new Edit button to users with Twitter Blue subscriptions following the poll results. Recently, Musk conducted a poll and asked fans whether the platform should reinstate former US President Donald Trump’s account. Most users agreed on Trump’s return, and Musk lifted the suspension the following day. The former US President’s account was suspended for allegedly instigating the US Capitol Riots in January 2021. Trump is yet to tweet from his old account.