Twitter: Double the characters, double the hate speech?

Spare a thought for Twitter. Its most high-profile user, the ill-informed, mendacious and downright abusive Cheeto-In-Chief, uses the platform as his personal playground for dangerous squabbles that may just go nuclear.

And as every school bully knows, bigger is better, which is why President Trump may well be celebrating Twitter's latest unremarkable innovation - doubling its character count limit from 140 to 280. Imagine what he might achieve with this new wordiness.

Unlike other social media sites, Twitter is pretty much the same platform it was when it was launched more than a decade ago. What has changed, however, is the technology around it. In 2006, the notion of communicating in brief written messages was rather fun. Today, there are many more enjoyable, less damaging ways of doing this - especially when just reading some of the comments on Twitter can cost you 30 IQ points.

TWICE AS MUCH HATE SPEECH

While Twitter acknowledged that for long-time users there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters, the company stated that it wanted to allow people to express more of their thoughts without running out of room to tweet.

Another renowned user, JK Rowling, was not impressed: "Twitter's destroyed its USP. The whole point, for me, was how inventive people could be within that concise framework," she tweeted. The Harry Potter author, who is expert at taking down some of the worst detritus of the internet, loved the platform for its brevity (a bit rich coming from someone whose last book in the series came in at just under 800 pages, but that's another story).

Predictably, when Twitter made its big announcement, the internet burst into flames. Twice as many characters equals twice as much hate speech, the people shouted. And they may have a point. There's something about online media that facilitates, nay encourages, the spread of misinformation, untruths and nationalist views. The right wing, which always has so much more to say, certainly seems delighted.

Recent research by the University of Southern California suggests that between 9% and 15% of active Twitter accounts are bots. Since Twitter currently has 319 million monthly active users, that translates to nearly 48 million bot accounts - those run by computers instead of humans.

And that's what Twitter is today, a home for bots, liars, Russian influence networks and, closer to home, the Gupta family's propaganda campaign.

BAN THE NAZIS

On the heels of the 280-character update, Twitter revealed it is extending the length of display names, too. "Starting today, your Twitter display name can be up to 50 characters in length!" tweeted Twitter Support. The backlash was instant, with many using their wordier display names to protest the firm's senseless decisions.

A large number of those voicing condemnation of the changes see them as a digression from more important issues that Twitter continues to ignore. Certainly, there are bigger problems with the social media platform that should have taken priority.

Twitter's failure to deal with offensive messages prompted German artist Shahak Shapira to take matters into his own hands in August this year, when he staged a protest outside the company's Hamburg headquarters. He reported 300 hate comments to Twitter over a period of six months - not insults or jokes, he says, but serious threats of violence. He received only nine answers, each of them stating there was no violation of Twitter's rules. The other complaints went unanswered.

So instead of letting racists, misogynists and homophobes spout even more shouty crap, how about putting an end to sinister means of amplifying content, providing better ways to report abuse, taking a clear stance against hate speech, fixing the clearly broken blue-tick verification system (which verified the organiser of the Charlottesville march) and, yes, banning the Nazis?