Twitter won't count photos, videos, @names in replies toward 140 characters “in the coming months”, will allow self-retweets, touts improved onboarding metrics
Over the past decade, the Tweet has evolved from a simple 140-character text message to a rich canvas …
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement is the first concrete step in a retreat from Twitter's founding constraint that had been building since late 2015, when critics argued the company should drop the arbitrary 140-character cap to win mainstream users (remove the 140-character limit), followed by reports that a longer-tweet product was already in development. By exempting photos, videos and @names from the count, Twitter is effectively widening tweets without formally breaking the 140 promise.
The cadence that follows confirms this was a staged unwinding, not a one-off: media attachments were formally excluded that September (media attachments stop counting September 19), @names in replies were excluded by early 2017 (@ Replies stop counting), and by 2022 the endpoint was visible in Twitter Notes, a long-form writing feature that abandons the constraint entirely.
First-order effects
- Users gain real headroom inside the same 140-character tweet: a photo, video or @name mention no longer eats into the text budget, so replies can tag people without sacrificing message length.
- Self-retweets become possible, letting accounts re-share their own tweets directly instead of copying text into a new post.
Second-order effects
- Third-party clients and scheduling tools that hard-coded 140-character validation have to rebuild their counting logic per attachment type, fragmenting behavior between official and unofficial apps.
- Because the change ships 'in the coming months' rather than immediately, publishers and power users face a transition window where tweet-length planning differs across platforms.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to the 140-character limit becoming a display convention rather than a data constraint — each exemption narrows what the number actually measures until a formal long-form format (as Twitter Notes eventually was) can replace it without a jarring break.
- Onboarding metrics as the stated justification signals that Twitter's product decisions were being optimized for new-user activation over veteran-user simplicity, a tradeoff that shaped every subsequent expansion of the Tweet format.
The trend: Twitter has been incrementally dismantling its 140-character constraint — first media, then mentions, then long-form formats — converting the Tweet from a fixed-size message into a flexible container.