Twitter 280-character limit lets users play Tetris, Chess and Connect Four in tweets

Users have been busy finding brand new ways to ridicule the micro-blogging site

The site has come under heavy fire over recent weeks (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

People are using Twitter’s new 280-character tweet limit to play classic games.

Tetris, Chess, Connect Four and Go are just some of the games users have managed to bring to the site.

The micro-blogging site doubled its character limit last week, and users have been busy finding brand new ways to ridicule the move.

The Twitter account @TwtPlayTetris, created by Salvatore Aiello, is calling on Twitter users to play an extremely slow-moving game of Tetris by submitting votes for what the next move should be.

The account is posting updates every five minutes, as the shapes fall and rotate in stages.

Others, including Gizmodo’s Bryan Menegus, are playing chess, using the expanded character limit to create a full board complete with black and white chess piece characters.

Twitter says it expected people to initially get “very excited” about the extra tweet-space and do “silly (creative!) things like writing just a few characters per line to make their tweets extra large”, but it might not have foreseen these particular use-cases.

The company also decided to more-than-double its character allowance for display names last week, lifting the limit from 20 to 50.

The site has also come under heavy fire because of fake accounts being run by Russian trolls, and for recently verifying the account of a white supremacist.

“I’m concerned that Twitter seems to be vastly underestimating the number of fake accounts and bots pushing disinformation,” said Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, earlier this month, the New York Times reports.

“Independent researchers have estimated that up to 15 percent of Twitter accounts – or potentially 48 million accounts – are fake or automated,” Mr. Warner said in his opening statement.