Twitter and Trump

Recently, Twitter released news that they are increasing the character limit from 140 to 280, stating that this change will help users “easily express themselves.” At first glance, this seems like a small detail and a minor change. One might be inclined to just say, “Oh, I can write more on Twitter. What’s so bad or important about that?” Well, let’s talk about how that affects the ‘face’ of Twitter, Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has taken the US by surprise with some of his outrageous tweets, where he has mocked fellow politicians. However, Twitter turned a blind eye as the US president’s frequent outbursts helped increase the number of users by 2 million to 319 million. With 280 characters instead of 140, we’re sure to hear more from the successful entrepreneur.

Twitter decided on the original 140 characters because of the guarantee of the message’s universality, regardless of phone or computer. President Trump took advantage of this and used Twitter as his platform to communicate to the community. It was a shot to the ‘dishonest’ media, as Trump didn’t have as much need for them anymore. With twice as much space to write his tweets, one can only speculate what Donald Trump will do with that. I can see it going either one of two ways:

1) President Trump keeps doing his thing: short messages that get straight to the point. Trump has very comfortably used Twitter while the 140 character limit was still present. Why fix something that isn’t broken…

2) We get to see 2 times the Trump. With the Twitter limit now almost doubling in size, Trump could take advantage of this and write longer tweets.

Without a doubt, it will be interesting to see what Trump does with the expanded Tweet limit. One can only wonder what will happen.