Technology

The Worst Consequence of Twitter’s New Character Limit

The president is becoming coherent.

This is so much worse.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images

The sonneteers of social media are a-moan about the Twitter update that now grants each user 280 characters to play with, up from 140. Relaxing the platform’s formal constraints tweaks the rules of the game and maims the soul of wit, which is brevity, which is a sentence construction I would never have dreamed of posting under the old regime, when one counted one’s clauses like my Depression-raised grandparents thumbing coupons at the grocery store.

But attitudes about plenitude and scarcity rarely arise in a vacuum. These perceptions take shape in historical context; in 2017, that means they are likely forming under the malignant shadow of Donald J. Trump.

With @realDonaldTrump exuding a steady flow of angry nonsense from the White House, Twitter doesn’t just represent a social networking service. It is a weapon. News of its roomier entry field feels a bit like news that a tyrant’s cudgel has been swapped out for a bigger cudgel.

In fact, though, the consequences of the shift are subtler, if no less insidious: President Trump’s tweets have started to make sense.

Behold the evidence:

The character counts on the above tweets clock in at 217, 213, and 215, respectively. It turns out that more space in which to spread out and unwind his thoughts has helped the president communicate. This shouldn’t surprise us as Trump does not seem like the most disciplined cogitator. On the stump, free of word limits and teleprompters, he can get snarled in digression and incoherence. But on Twitter, twice as many letters allows POTUS to meander without losing the thread, to squeeze in some of the redundancies that he believes emphasize his points, and to intensify his language with the verys and completelys that prop up his spoken rhetoric.

This is a bummer. Trump’s truncation-abetted stupidity on his favorite website can seem useful in retrospect—actionable proof of unfitness for office—and it could also be sort of wonderful, like walking outside to find a winged elephant floundering in your birdbath. His rambling was dark comedy. It was delicious junk food. Now the president is serving up tweets that are both bad for you and, in their lack of goofy distractions, unpleasant to read.

As of Thursday, Trump has also posted some anodyne messages that both hew to Twitter’s bygone stringency and read like normal English.

What could this mean? Maybe the raver-in-chief’s handlers are viewing Twitter’s update as an occasion to rethink their approach to moderating his social media use. Maybe they’re about to start editing him more comprehensively. Or maybe Trump is capable, now and then, of crafting a brief and clear couple of sentences the way you sometimes experience lucid moments in a nightmare. Even before the word-count expansion, he sometimes wrote tweets that didn’t require a special decoder ring.

On the other hand, remember this crazy word lasagna (114 characters)?

Trump must have felt pressure to prune his dumb claim—something about how he’d always suspected that, without Clinton’s devious interference, he would have run against Sanders, and now he continues to believe that. The statement sputters along in characteristic staccato bursts that never quite connect to each other.

Or consider this tweet at a lean 111 characters:

Somehow Trump is both convoluted and totally unsubtle. Immigrants are OK, his circular phrasing suggests, but their families are occasionally the worst, and all of this is very bad. (What’s he got against Melania’s parents?) The need to drive home the ghastliness of the situation within limited Twitter acreage produces a pure id-like ejaculation: NOT ACCEPTABLE! You see similar endings on other tweets from the Before Times, such as when the president reassured Dreamers that “no action!” would boot them from the country. Also, England “need[ed] to be proactive!” about terror.

In the plus-size tweets, though, Trump’s percussive mindlessness (“sad!”) has elongated into political cant (“The North Korean regime has pursued its nuclear & ballistic missile programs in defiance of every assurance…”). The dense core of his insatiable self-regard (“I was right”) has unfolded into chattiness (“…then will be headed to China where I very much look forward to…”). In this new social media order, will we consume presidential Twitter differently, as a series of legible messages rather than a geyser of ranty gobbledygook? Lulled by Trump’s ability to color within slightly wider lines, will we forget that he is stupid and desperate and mean?

One second, I’m composing a tweet.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Also, I did find one counterexample:

The syntactical wormhole lurking in this 210-character post—and notice its simplistic kicker, our old friend, too!—could swallow hundreds of tons of American military equipment. It’s possible that @realDonaldTrump: the Extended Edition will just be more of the same.