Twitter Finally Ditched The Egg Avatar With A Human Silhouette
Twitter has finally ditched the egg avatar. This icon has been usually a symbol of anonymous online harassment. After the seven-year use of their iconic bird motif, it introduced a new default profile picture, switching the egg avatar into a simple human-shaped silhouette. Will this make a difference to the netizens on their movement against cyber abuse and harassment? Let us find out here for more details.
The eminent social media platform aims to persuade users to replace this default image into their own actual photo. This move also aims to assuage abuse from anonymous and notorious social media trolls, according to reports from Mac World. The company's design choice is for their aggressive drive to restrain the increasing number of social media harassment, abuse, and internet trolling because of this service.
In addition to this, 9to5Mac reports said that Twitter chose this change to ascertain that a profile placeholder should represent a specific set of qualities as it should be universal, generic, temporary, inclusive as well as gender-balanced. They deemed that getting rid of the egg avatar is one of their ways to take a stand and address the issue. Certain measures have been rolling out in the platform to clean up spam and harassment. One of them is the latest announcement of muting features, which make it easy for users to filter unnecessary content and notifications in their respective timelines.
According to USA Today, the ditching of the egg avatar came at the point in time where the company is still grappling with how to curb harassment on the social media platform. The drive against abuse has been led by their CEO Jack Dorsey and pledged a completely new approach regarding this. They started with a series of app updates and have prevented users which have been permanently suspended from the app to create new accounts again using dubious accounts. Further reports said that the social media platform is trying to get rid of their reputation of being the home to being an internet troll. The company wanted to boost back their user base from the pressure of Wall Street. Accordingly, Twitter is said to have 319 million monthly active users, which is 4% higher than their previous year.