I left the Social Security office with a letter in hand confirming my name change. I’d decided to go by both my last name and my new husband’s—Valerie Woolard Srinivasan. On my walk back to work, I figured I’d make the change official on Twitter as well. I opened the application and went to edit my profile, but when I entered my new name, it cut off. Upon further investigation, I realized that names on Twitter are capped at 20 characters, and my new 26-character one would not do.
The more I thought about it, the less sense the restriction made. For starters, the 20-character limit seemed bizarrely low. The preciousness of characters on Twitter provides a reasonable explanation for why handles should be capped at 15 characters—so that Twitter users can reference each other without burning through too many of their precious 140 characters. But the same reasoning doesn’t apply to the name field, which appears along with a user’s handle in timelines and on their profiles.
Twenty characters may sound plenty generous if you have a short name. But what would “Boutros Boutros-Ghali” (21 characters) have done if he’d had a Twitter account? Under Twitter’s current regime, “Franklin D. Roosevelt” (21 characters) would have to eliminate his middle initial or at least the period after it. “Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis” (26 characters) would have to get more creative. “Kim Kardashian West” (19 characters) makes it in just under the wire.
Of course, this critique assumes that Twitter expressly wants people to use their real names on the service. That’s not entirely fair: While both Google and Facebook have had various public tussles around their enforcement of real-names policies, Twitter has done nothing of the kind. Pseudonyms have always been welcome on Twitter. A quick scan through my feed includes names (again, not handles) that are emojis, real names, abbreviated names, pseudonyms, puns, and business names. Twitter has held fast to this position, even as the company has faced criticism for the harassment that takes place on the service, often behind the anonymity of pseudonyms and eggs. Proponents of real names or verification policies see them as a means of increasing accountability and therefore civility.
The lack of real names policy makes sense given Twitter’s popularity with dissidents and others who wish to remain anonymous on the service. Even so, users should still have the option of using their real names if they so choose, whether they wish to do so as a matter of accountability, personal branding, or just the desire to be found. And certainly Twitter doesn’t want to appear to discourage use of real names. But the 20-character limit has exactly that effect—and notably, it’s much more likely to hinder people who follow different cultural naming conventions, or women who chose to use a hyphenated or compound last name after marriage. For example, in Spanish-speaking cultures, people will often have two or more family names, and Indian names sometimes include the name of the name of a person’s town of origin in addition to their given and family names. These traditions often result in names longer than Twitter’s allowances.
As Twitter struggles to find a buyer, it should be trying to gain more global and universal appeal, and allowing for longer names on its profiles would be a very easy way to be just a little more inclusive and welcoming. The 20-character limit is likely the result of an entirely benign concern, such as the desire to ensure that names can always fit in a single line of text in the interface, rather than any intent to exclude people with long names. People find ways to work around it, including using initials, nicknames, partial names, or pseudonyms. But extending the length of the name field would not do anything to curb Twitter’s larger problems with harassment and corporate upheaval, but a name is a central part of identity, and being told that your name is not suitable for a given platform can certainly be alienating. Just as they have become just a bit more lax about character counts in tweets, maybe Twitter doesn’t have to so fiercely guard every character of the name field in the interest of appealing a bit more broadly to the longer-named among us.
