Twitter rolls out double character count after testing

Nov. 7 (UPI) -- Twitter announced Tuesday it is doubling the character limit for most users' tweets after two months of testing shows the possibility of expanded content shouldn't "substantially change" the timeline reading experience.

The social media company started testing the 280-character limit in September for some users tweeting in languages that tend to have "cramming issues." More "dense" languages like Japanese, Korean and Chinese don't have as many problems keeping posts under the 140-character limit unlike English, Spanish or French, Twitter said.

Twitter said its goal was to allow every person in the world to express themselves easily in a tweet "while ensuring we keep the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter."

Many of the users who had the 280-character limit during the test period used the full number of characters available to them at first, but leveled back out to at or below 140 characters later.

"We -- and many of you -- were concerned that timelines may fill up with 280 character Tweets, and people with the new limit would always use up the whole space. But that didn't happen," Twitter said. "Only 5 percent of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2 percent were over 190 characters. As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, you'll still see about the same amount of Tweets in your timeline."

The new double-character limits will not apply to users tweeting in Japanese, Korean or Chinese.