By Barbara Ortutay, Technology Reporter
NEW YORK (AP) --Twitter says it's ending its iconic 140-character limit — and giving nearly everyone 280 characters.
Users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean will still have the original limit. That's because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.
The company says 9 percent of tweets written in English hit the 140-character limit. People end up spending more time editing tweets or don't send them out at all. Twitter hopes that the expanded limit will get more people tweeting more, helping its lackluster user growth. Twitter has been testing the new limit for weeks and is starting to roll it out Tuesday.
The company has been slowly easing restrictions to let people cram more characters into a tweet. It stopped counting polls, photos, videos and other things toward the limit. Even before it did so, users found creative ways to get around the limit. This includes multi-part tweets and screenshots of blocks of text.
Twitter's character limit was created so that tweets could fit into a single text message, back when many people were using texts to receive tweets. But now, most people use Twitter through its mobile app; the 140-character limit is no longer a technical constraint but nostalgia.
Civil rights groups call on major corporations to stick with DEI programs
A broad group of civil rights organizations called on the CEOs and board members of major companies Thursday to maintain their commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that have come under attack online and in lawsuits.
An open letter signed by 19 organizations and directed at the leaders of Fortune 1000 companies said companies that abandon their DEI programs are shirking their fiduciary responsibility to employees, consumers and shareholders.
The civil rights groups included the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the League of United Latin American Citizens, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
"Diversity, equity and inclusion programs, policies, and practices make business-sense and they're broadly popular among the public, consumers, and employees," their statement read. "But a small, well-funded, and extreme group of right-wing activists is attempting to pressure companies into abandoning their DEI programs."
Companies such as Ford, Lowes, John Deere, Molson Coors and Harley-Davidson recently announced they would pull back on their diversity, equity and inclusion policies after facing pressure from conservative activists who were emboldened by recent victories in the courtroom.
Many major corporations have been examining their diversity programs in the wake of a Supreme Court decision last year that declared race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions unconstitutional. Dozens of cases have been filed making similar arguments about employers. Critics of DEI programs say the initiatives provide benefits to people of one race or sexual orientation while excluding others.
In their letter, the civil rights organizations, which also included... Read More