April 4, 2017 | Online

Twitter dumps egg to battle trolls

Twitter has decided its default "egg" avatar is a major reason there are so many nasty people using the social media platform.

Bullies and trolls will often keep the egg, spending less time personalizing their Twitter accounts and more time harassing others. With this in mind, Twitter has replaced the egg with a grey-on-grey gender-neutral head.

Take that trolls!

“We’ve noticed patterns of behaviour with accounts that are created only to harass others – often they don’t take the time to personalise their accounts,” a spokesperson explained. “This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behaviour, which isn’t fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven’t yet personalised their profile photo.”

So now we'll associate trolls with a faceless grey head. This is progress?

Twitter went to great lengths to explain how "inclusive" the new image was, while emphasizing it spent a lot of time working on the perfect head shape.

“We felt that the circle of the head in the figure still seemed masculine, even though it technically had no design characteristics to indicate that it was a man. ... people have come to associate the circle head with masculinity."

Sadly, this is not an April Fool's joke.

Twitter needs to spend more time enforcing its Terms of Service and actually banning accounts promoting hate and bigotry and abuse, and less time worried about the shape of its default avatar.