A tweet is a short post (or "micropost") on the social network X, formerly known as Twitter. Tweets can include images, videos, GIFs, straw polls, hashtags, mentions, and hyperlinks. Around 80% of all tweets are made by 10% of users, averaging 138 tweets per month, with the median user making only two tweets per month. Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in October 2022, and rebranding of the platform as X in July 2023, all references to the word "tweet" were removed from the service, changed to a straightforward "post", and "retweet" changed to "repost"; the terms "tweet" and "retweet" are still more popular when referring to posts on X, however.
Content The service has experimented with changing how tweets work over the years to attract more users and to keep them on the site. Tweets were limited to 140 characters when Twitter started in 2006. Since 2017, a tweet can contain up to 280 characters and included media does not count toward the character limit. Users subscribed to X Premium (formerly Twitter Blue) can post up to 25,000 characters and can include bold and italic styling.
Character limit Tweets originally were limited to 140 characters when Twitter was launched in 2006. Twitter was originally designed to be used on SMS text messages, which are limited to 160 characters. Twitter reserved 20 characters for the username, leaving 140 characters for the post. The original limit was seen as an iconic fixture of the platform, encouraging "speed and brevity". Increasing the limit had been a topic of discussion inside the company for years, and had been resurfaced in 2015 for ways to grow the userbase. At the time, internal discussion also involved excluding links and mentions from the character limit. By January 2016, an internal product named "Beyond 140" was in development, targeting Q1 of the same year for expanding tweet limits. By the end of 2015, the company was moving close to introducing a 5,000 or 10,000 character limit. An unfinalized version had tweets that went over the old 140 character threshold only showing the first 140 characters, with a call-to-action that there was more in the tweet. Clicking on the tweet would reveal the rest, which was done to retain the same feel of the timeline. The change was controversial internally and met with backlash by users. Dorsey confirmed that the 140 character limit would remain, but had told employees upon his return as CEO that the once-sacred aspects of Twitter were no longer untouchable. In May 2016, a week after being leaked, Twitter announced that media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, quote tweets) nor mentions in replies would no longer increase the character limit to be rolled out later in the year to ready developers. The changes rolled out in September, except for the @replies, which were tested in October and then rolled out in March 2017, a year after the original announcement. These changes were a compromise to internal resistance to a 10,000 character limit from the year before. On September 26, 2017, Twitter announced the company was testing doubling the character limit—from 140 to 280. It was an effort for users to be more expressive with their tweets, as users were otherwise cramming ideas into a single tweet by rewriting and removing vowels, or not tweeting at all. It began testing to a small group of users in all languages, excluding Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, because the three languages can say double the amount of information in one character. According to the company's statistics, 0.4% of tweets in Japanese hit the 140 character ceiling, while 9% of tweets in English hit the ceiling. Users not in the test group were able to see and interact with them normally. The change was similarly controversial internally as the 10,000 character limit proposal. The immediate reaction by Twitter users was largely negative.
Links URLs can be linked to on X. A tweet's links are converted to the t.co link shortener, and use up 23 characters out of the limit. The shortener was introduced in June 2011 to allow users to save space on their links, without needing a third-party service like Bitly or TinyURL.
Media
Some users use screenshots of text and uploaded them as images to increase the amount of words they could include in a tweet.
Cards
Beginning in 2012, tweets linking to partnered websites would show, below the content of the tweet, expanded media: an excerpt of a linked news article or an embedded video. Twitter already had a way to see Instagram posts and YouTube videos, called "expanded tweets". Twitter then began allowing websites apply to test offering cards for Twitter users. Later in 2012, notably after Facebook purchased it, Instagram started cropping images displayed in cards, with the plan to end them all together.
CoTweets Between July 2022 and January 2023, Twitter tested a feature where two users could be the author of a tweet, which would be posted on both of their accounts. Both users' profile pictures, names, and handles are shown. One user drafts a tweet in the Composer field, then invite a user that is both following them and has their account published. Edits could not be made once the invite was sent, with the alternative being deleting the invitation and making a second one. The second author could accept the invitation, at which the tweet would then be posted to both accounts. Once published, the second user could revoke them being a co-author, and the tweet would change to being written by the first author and being removed from the second author's tweets. Until the second author accepts the invitation, the tweet would be unlisted, not appearing on the authors' timelines or in searches, but available via a direct link. It was tested with some accounts in the US, Canada, and South Korea. The company noted during the test that the feature may be turned off and all CoTweets deleted. The feature was spotted in code in December 2021. On January 31, Twitter suddenly and quietly decided to stop new CoTweets from being made, though noted that it could return in the future. CoTweets were able to be seen for another month, before being converted to a normal tweet for the first author, and a retweet for the second author. Though Twitter's support page offered a generic reasoning for discontinuing the feature, Elon Musk said that it was to focus on allowing users to add text attachments.
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