Twitter updates | 60-minute videos, employee icons and the return of political ads

Twitter is changing again. This time, it plans to remove the ban on political advertising, and for users with paid subscriptions, they added the ability to download 60-minute videos (Twitter Blue subscription) and identify company employees (new Twitter Blue for Business subscription). Read more below.

Twitter Blue users can now upload 60-minute videos

Twitter has set its sights on making the platform more attractive to video creators. Twitter Blue subscribers can now download 60-minute videos from the web at 1080p resolution and a 2GB file size.

Prior to this, Twitter Blue subscribers could upload 10-minute 1080p videos to the platform with a file size limit of 512MB. For iOS or Android, this limitation still applies.

New Twitter Blue for Business subscription will allow companies to identify their employees

Recently, Twitter launched a special "Blue for Business" subscription that highlights its owners with a golden tick. A little later, it also became known that the subscription will allow organizations to identify brands and people associated with them using special icons that will appear next to the person's nickname.

So far, the Blue for Business pilot program has only been launched for selected businesses. But soon the subscription will be available to more organizations.

An example of an icon that will indicate that you are an employee of the company can be seen below: a square Twitter icon next to Crawford's display name means that she is an employee of the company.

Also, brands, media houses and other companies now have a square profile picture instead of a round one.

Twitter has not yet shared details on how much a Blue for Business subscription will cost or what other features it will include.

Twitter to lift ban on political ads to boost its revenue

"Political message reach should be earned, not bought" no longer works. Twitter said it plans to lift its ban on political ads soon.

The company introduced the ban back in 2019, distinguishing itself from other social networks like Facebook and Instagram that allowed political ads.

The lifting of the ban is obviously due to the fact that advertisers have recently begun to seriously reduce spending on the platform. Twitter also said it’s relaxing its norms about cause-based ads — ads related to topics like social equality and environmental change — in the US.

There's little detail yet on what terms the company is changing, but Twitter's ads policy page has revealed that cause-based ads should be geo-restricted.

"Advertisers whose cause-based ads target only within the United States are exempt from the above-listed restrictions."