Twitter has followed up its move to double the character limit of tweets to 280 by increasing the length of a username to 50 characters.
This is far less impacting that the 280 character expansion, and certainly less controversial, but it may be useful for people with longer names or those who like to add emojis or change their name to witty statements regularly. The name function doesn’t change a user’s Twitter handle, which remains the same.
While Twitter’s new moves might help unlock engagement, there is plenty of disappointment that the company has chosen to focus on cosmetic changes rather than combating long-standing problems such as abuse on the platform.
Twitter’s handling of harassment and trolls is such that one employee decided to take things into their own hands and deactive President’s Trump’s account on their last day with the company — the ultimate mic-drop-on-my-way-out.
The account was offline for 11 minutes before it was restored. The action reportedly got a solid endorsement from numerous of Twitter staff behind the scenes but it left the social media company with egg on its face.
But hey, now you can adopt a 50-character username…
https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/928840231964438528