One of the defining options of Twitter since its inception has been the character restrict, forcing customers to be direct and concise. It’s such a giant deal that when the restrict was doubled, from simply 140 characters to 280, it turned a subject of primetime TV gags. But beneath the guiding hand of latest proprietor Elon Musk, there seems to be no line that New Twitter gained’t cross. So in case you pay up for the Twitter Blue premium service, now you can publish as much as ten thousand characters in a single tweet.

In case you’re not within the behavior of counting your keystrokes, 10,000 characters is roughly 1,800 English phrases, or six pages of a normal paperback ebook. Twitter Blue subscribers will even have entry to daring, italic, and underline instruments denied to everybody else, as reported by The Verge. If that appears antithetical to the very idea of Twitter as a platform for brief messages, nicely, it’s hardly the primary time that Twitter has undermined itself within the final 12 months. The transfer is a reasonably apparent response to would-be rival Substack, which recently created a Twitter-style “Notes” feature that focuses on — you guessed it — quick messages.

Notably, Twitter blocked embedded tweets in Substack newsletters on Thursday, simply in the future after Substack introduced the Notes characteristic. It’s a harsh blow to impartial writers who deal with Substack as a way of each communication and revenue, and Twitter because the “public square” of opinion and information that attracted Musk to its buy within the first place. The New York Times quotes Hung Up writer Hunter Harris: “It’s incredibly petty.”

It’s merely the newest in a string of controversial strikes by Twitter beneath Musk’s management. Twitter briefly blocked links to social competitors like Mastodon and Instagram, changed its whole public relations crew with a poop emoji, and appeared to openly endorse joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin by changing its emblem. A latest spat with National Public Radio led NPR and PBS to exit the platform. While blocking rivals appears to be in opposition to Musk’s oft-repeated philosophy of “free speech absolutism,” the platform itself is becoming a welcome home to hate speech, together with racial slurs in the handles of verified Twitter Blue customers.

The related account was suspended after the story broke, so Twitter is probably not solely resistant to press criticism, poop emoji or not.