Twitter is planning to raise the character limit in tweets from 280 to 4000 characters. Twitter CEO Elon Musk confirmed the news in a tweet over the weekend, though the exec didn’t share an ETA for the change.

The last time Twitter changed the character limit in tweets was in 2017 when it doubled from the original 140 characters to 280. Raising that limit to 4000 characters represents a 14x increase, and that’s a massive change.

Twitter used to be known as a microblogging site, and the original 140-character limit was close to the 160-character limit in text messages. This forced Twitter users to be concise, and the company doubling the character limit five years ago didn’t really change that.

“Twitter is about brevity. It’s what makes it such a great way to see what’s happening. Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter. That is something we will never change,” the company said at the time.

In late November, Elon Musk shared slides of an internal presentation showing a new feature named “Longform tweets.” We don’t have many more details yet, but Longform tweets appeared alongside other upcoming features such as encrypted DMs and payments.

Longform tweets appeared in an internal presentation shared by Elon Musk

It’s hard to imagine scrolling posts of 4000 characters in Twitter’s cramped newsfeed, so maybe Twitter users will need to click a link to read tweets with 4000 characters. Anyway, this is likely something the company will need to test extensively.

As we’ve seen with Twitter’s poorly thought-out experiments with Twitter Blue and the Verified badge, Elon Musk isn’t afraid of failed experiments. “Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t,” Musk tweeted last month.

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