Its a world announced fact that Twitter faces some serious issues of harassment on its platform and has the company has left almost no stone unturned to fix this issue. It has banned many users, both temporarily and permanently, for using its service, but the problem still continues to be a issue.
Today, they have taken another step to challenge this problem, which may not appeal to a lot of people. Remember the egg which was your default profile picture on Twitter, well it cracks finally. Twitter has now announced to replaces the default egg with a unisex profile picture similar to a head and shoulders silhouette.
For past seven years, everyone who created a Twitter account, started with the egg profile. It symbolized how an egg hatches into a bird to send tweets which one reads. Since then, it has been an integral part of brand Twitter. Someone who is not on Twitter also identifies that white egg on a blue background as something that belongs to Twitter.
Twitter gave many reasons to explain this shift. They told that people find the egg profile picture cute and therefore never use their actual photo on their profile. Therefore, a change to the more generic form will persuade them to put their own profile picture which will make the account more authentic. This argument does make some sense to me.
What bewilders me is when they say that they are switching to the silhouette so that they could curb abuse on the platform. They think that abusers often don’t waste time in personalizing their accounts and therefore have the egg as their profile picture which has created “an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior.”
What The company seems unable to grasp is that the harassing comments which until now came from egg account will now be sent via silhouette account. And an abuse is an abuse be it coming from someone with a profile picture of an egg, a silhouette or himself. This effort may reduce the abusive tweets for a few days, but it is certainly not a permanent solution.
And to the corollary, Twitter once again lost another identifiable signature which was unique to it.
