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Twitter Brings Uniformity to Emoji Character Count

Twitter Brings Uniformity to Emoji Character Count

By Tasneem Akolawala | Updated: 11 October 2018 18:42 IST

All 2,823 official emojis will get the equal character count treatment

Highlights

Twitter has now set the emoji character count as two
Earlier, some emojis had more character counts than others
It increased the tweet character limit to 280 last year

In a new development, Twitter is rolling out a welcome change for emoji lovers. Moving forward, emoji character count will be set at a default, instead of having different character counts for different emojis. Up until now, Twitter recognised some emojis as two characters, while it recognised other emojis with skin tones and gender options as more characters. However, Twitter has now set a default of two character limit for emojis, and the change is refreshing, given the ceiling limit for a tweet is 280 characters. It is particularly grand for users who love using emojis in their tweets.

Twitter made this announcement on its developer platform, stating that now the social media site will count all emojis equally, including those with gender and skin tone modifiers. Earlier, many emojis (including multiple gender and skin tone-based emojis) have counted as more characters than other emojis, limiting the room for people to express themselves via a tweet. Different emojis had different character counts adding more to the confusion.

"Moving forward, in support of recent updates to Unicode, Twitter will now count all emojis equally, including those with gender and skin tone modifiers. This update marks significant progress for our service, and everyone can now benefit from the additional room to express themselves with more characters (or more emojis)," Twitter notes on the forum.

Emojipedia further reports that Twitter will use the 2,823 emojis in the Twemoji library to offer the equal-character-count treatment, and emojis that extends outside of the standard Unicode RGI will continue to use more than two characters. This was confirmed byTwitter Design Lead Bryan Haggerty himself. In any case, users will now be able to tweet using more emojis as a form of expression, given the default character count is now in place.

Twitter, last year, increased its character count to 280 from 140 to let users express better via single tweet, and not post multiple tweets to get a point across. Recently, it even introduced a data saver' feature to give users the option to decide the amount of data they intend to invest on specific content.

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Further reading: Twitter

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Twitter Brings Uniformity to Emoji Character Count

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