Campus Viewpoints: Twitter’s 280-character extension

“The Union” went around campus and asked students opinions on Twitter’s announcement to extend the character count from 140 to 280. The news has sparked much debate from users saying that the 140 character limitation is enough while the opposing side argues that the extra characters are necessary.

Ericka Jones, 24, UCLA graduate: “I think initially with the birth of twitter, having to package what you wanted to say in a finite abbreviated way was difficult but I think folks have made it an art form being able to put them in a nice concise, impactful, powerful, meaningful few characters. I think that it is a benefit to having an extended character limit just because Twitter is in fact a global platform used by its citizens and I love that it accommodates languages that use more characters than say English for example. I think people will have new set of boundaries and will still probably have a similar dilemma because it still has a certain amount of characters.”

Erick Ibarra, 18, business major: “It’s the same. I don’t see the difference like when people tweet over the limit but have more to say they make it into a thread but if you’re interested in it then you’ll keep reading and if not you’ll just stop. It’ll just be more words to read on one tweet rather than a thread. I guess if they wanted to make a feature it’d be the edit button, like if you misspell something you can fix it later.”

Edwin Ventura, 20, film major: “If they pass the 280 tweet extension permanently, I feel like it’ll lose what makes “Twitter” Twitter and then what’s to say it’s just like Facebook. I won’t use Facebook. But I think it’ll be good for news and memes which is what I go on Twitter for.”

Jernezsa Jefferson, 21, child development major: “I think it could be necessary for certain people I don’t think like an average twitter user will always go over I think people now in today’s society can limit and abbreviate the words but I can see it making sense for celebrities who would need that extended limit. I can definitely see them feature the edit button because I just write and when I look back and see that I misspell a lot.”

Lorenzo Babasa, 21, history major: “280 characters is way too long because Facebook already kind (of) has that and I personally don’t feel like reading everybody’s life story, I can read your thoughts but definitely not a whole paragraph. Feel like twitter is solid already and the 280 is too much.