Shakespeare told us that brevity is the soul of wit. But Shakespeare didn’t know jack about social media.
According to Reuters, Twitter is toying with tossing out its arbitrary 140-character limit and testing even more arbitrary double-stuffed 280 character tweets!
Unfortunately, the news doesn’t seem to be doubling anybody’s pleasure or fun. Instead, a massive wave of eyerolls rolled through the Twitterverse. Soon, people feared, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other trolls would have even more room to let their ideologies run rampant.
we really don’t ask for much but Twitter is dedicated to remaining an unmarketable cesspool of nazis and harassment pic.twitter.com/wwPyuY9RMg
— #1 mayhem stan keefe (@thathairyfemme) September 26, 2017
us: please remove these white supremacists
twitter: tired of getting harassed in 140 characters? enjoy it in 280! pic.twitter.com/WctPjxGczI
— #1 mayhem stan keefe (@thathairyfemme) September 26, 2017
Will it be enough to stop the president from tweeting clipped phrases and incomplete thoughts 🤔 https://t.co/EvqBPKas6F
— Kevin (@kwprime) September 26, 2017
new twitter pic.twitter.com/cCs4OETTEv
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) September 26, 2017
I love how Jack & Co. boast about new features that hardly anyone asked for, while ignoring countless ppl screaming about harassment #onhere
— Black ok? (@_hoemo) September 26, 2017
Like, if y’all are gonna ignore the real complaints & just focus on superficial “fixes”…what’s up w/ that edit button w/ history?
— Black ok? (@_hoemo) September 26, 2017
users: I’m being harassed
jack: uh huh
users: by nazis
jack:..
users: can you do something
jack: what if we gave them 280 characters
— ☕netw3rk (@netw3rk) September 26, 2017
everyone: please twitter do something about fake accounts, misogynists, assholes, nazis on twitter
twitter: EVERYONE GETS TO SAY MORE NOW— Amelia Harnish (@amelia_faith) September 26, 2017
While Twitter is home to some of our favorite quick witticisms, the social media platform does have quite the history of being a cursed cesspool. Trolls and more have driven several people off the site, like Saturday Night Live star Leslie Jones, who was harassed endlessly after right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos decided to sic his following on her.
Subscribe to get a twice-weekly dose of queer news, updates, and insights from the INTO team.in Your Inbox
All this begs the question: on a scale of 1 to 10, how much does Twitter just not want to deal with its harassment problem?