Doubling permissible length of a Tweet leads to more polite and healthier discussions online

Brevity is the soul of Twitter: The constraint affordance and political discussion 

Or as the Germans say, "In der Kürze liegt die Würze". Women may not necessarily share that opinion.

Abstract 

 Many hoped that social networks would allow for the open exchange of information and a revival of the public sphere. Unfortunately, conversations on social media are often toxic and not conducive to healthy political discussion. Twitter, the most widely used social network for political discussions, doubled the limit of characters in a Tweet in November 2017, which provided a natural experiment to study the causal effect of technological affordances on political discussions with a discontinuous time series design. Using supervised and unsupervised natural language processing methods, we analyze 358,242 Tweet replies to U.S. politicians from January 2017 to March 2018. We show that the doubling the permissible length of a Tweet led to more polite, less informal, more analytical, and overall healthier discussions online. However, the declining trend in the political relevance of these tweets raises concerns about the implications of the changing norms for the quality of political deliberation. 

The Guardian a year ago cautioned.

Brevity is the soul of Twitter. We don't need 280 characters to say that

Twitter’s 140-character limit forces its users to be funnier. It can’t compete with Facebook and shouldn’t try.

true strength is knowing u have the ability to tweet 280 characters, but the wisdom & restraint to only tweet 140

— KT NELSON (@KrangTNelson) September 27, 2017

Strength, even more so if it is mental, is commendable but so is politeness and that entails some form of refraining from showing that strength. The article concludes

 "Twitter is already great, and the last thing it needs is anyone trying to make it great again and again. Before we know it, the company will double the limit again to 560, and then they’ll remove it entirely, and then Twitter will become a crappy, bloviation-filled clone of Facebook that even Donald Trump doesn’t bother with." 

 We know how Trump handled that brilliantly and "that the doubling the permissible length of a Tweet led to more polite, less informal, more analytical, and overall healthier discussions online." And much more funny.  Here one of his very best.

Brenda Snipes, in charge of voting in Broward County, Florida, was just spotted wearing a beautiful dress with 300 I VOTED signs on it. Just kidding, she is a fine, very honorable and highly respected voting tactician!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2018

'highly respected voting tactician' - brilliant