Twitter drops 'egg' avatar in attempt to break association with internet trolls
Twitter is abandoning its default “egg” avatar in a bid to shake its association with trolls. For the past seven years, new Twitter accounts have been assigned a profile picture of an egg – a playful reference to the site’s bird logo. But on Friday the social network announced that it would be introducing default profile photos in a bid to “prompt more self-expression”, and to break free of the association with abuse and trolling on the platform. Some people had retained the default egg profile photo “because they thought it was fun and cute”, read a blog post circulated by Twitter’s product design and research team. he new default profile photo – a generic head-and-shoulders silhouette – would feel “more like an empty state or placeholder” to encourage users to upload their own images, it said.
[] Default profile picture when Twitter first launched in 2006 was of a silhouette of a person. The following year it changed to “o_O”, before the bird motif was introduced in 2009.
[] The egg was made the default in 2010.
I think that it is positive that social media accounts have recognised the problems that have occurred on their site and have thought of a way to resolve any issue, I can't say that would stop people still trolling as it is still an easy job to get a fake picture and put it up on a profile picture. The action needs to be more controlled to how to directly stop the problem as they would know that the internet is so advanced and people know how to get certain things down. As some people have also wrote about this issue saying that "changing the avatar would not address the real problem of abuse on the platform," “An abusive tweet is an abusive tweet, whether it’s next to an egg, a silhouette or a real person’s avatar."
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