If you’re an active Twitter user, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard the news by now. We’ll bring you up to speed just in case: Twitter has begun to roll out an increased character limit for tweets to some users. More specifically, Twitter has doubled its 140-character per tweet limit to 280 for some users. There has been a tremendous amount of early backlash on Twitter from users who are furious at the change. Of course, there’s a tremendous amount of backlash from furious users anytime Twitter changes anything. It’s inevitable. Also inevitable is the fact that once the change is fully rolled out, everyone will forget that there was ever a 140-character limit.
Despite the early rage, people are also very eager to try out the new change. After all, people on Twitter always have a ton of very important things to say. It will be a while before Twitter rolls out the new increased limit to everyone, but we have some good news: You don’t have to wait another minute to up your character count to 280 thanks to the simple have we found.
Well actually, this hack isn’t exactly simple. In fact, it takes quite a bit of browser tweaking, as you can see in this thread from developer Rob Graham:
From @dildog:
Click 'Tweet' in the web ui
F12 Remove 'disable' on the tweet button
Click it, and go to 'network', right click on the request and copy as cURL
Then, add &weighted_character_count=true as a param to the end of the url
Then, resubmit the tweet with curl.— Robᵉʳᵗ Graham😷, provocateur (@ErrataRob) September 27, 2017
Luckily, you don’t have to worry about any of that. There’s already a simple Chrome browser extension that you can install that will do all the heavily lifting for you. All you have to do is install TamperMonkey for Chrome, and then add the script found at this link on GitHub. Voila! You can now post 280-character tweets. This will only work on a computer and not on your iPhone or Android device, unfortunately, but at least you can double your tweet length when you’re near a computer.
There’s no telling if or when Twitter might roll out a fix for this workaround (though we’re not sure why the company would bother), so take advantage while you can.
