{"id":101859,"date":"2017-04-07T08:27:54","date_gmt":"2017-04-07T08:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/?p=101859"},"modified":"2017-04-07T08:27:54","modified_gmt":"2017-04-07T08:27:54","slug":"twitter-drops-the-egg-to-beat-online-abuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/twitter-drops-the-egg-to-beat-online-abuse\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter drops the egg to beat online abuse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 18px;\"><strong>Twitter is set to drop its default egg avatar in an attempt to encourage users to upload their own images and help fight the association the social network has with online abuse and trolling.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The egg will be replaced with a generic head and shoulders silhouette.\u00a0 According to a blog post published by <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.twitter.com\/2017\/rethinking-our-default-profile-photo\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter<\/a>, the new designed has been based on a study of bathroom signage iconography (toilets) and it purposely gender-neutral.<\/p>\n<p>The social network then went on to explain: \u201cWe\u2019ve noticed patterns of behavior with accounts that are created only to harass others \u2013 often they don\u2019t take the time to personalize their accounts. This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behavior, which isn\u2019t fair to people who are still new to Twitter and haven\u2019t yet personalized their profile photo.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>According to Twitter: \u201cThe new default image feels more like an empty state or placeholder, and we hope it encourages people to upload images that express themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Despite this being the sixth change to the default image over Twitter\u2019s 11-year history, many people initially dismissed the announcement as an April Fool joke \u2013 with the announcement being made late on March 31<sup>st<\/sup>.<\/p>\n<p>The news regarding the change has been dismissed by many users as too little, too late with many criticising the social network for not doing enough to combat online abuse.<\/p>\n<p>One social media user suggested: \u201cA good change would be not to allow default photos\/anonymous accounts.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Fitz Temper, a columnist for the technology blog TechCrunch <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2017\/03\/31\/twitter-is-getting-rid-of-the-egg-avatar-because-that-will-totally-fix-the-abuse-problem\/\" target=\"_blank\"><u>said<\/u><\/a>: \u201cWhat Twitter isn\u2019t understanding is that abusive tweets sent from an egg account will now just be abusive tweets sent from a silhouette\u00a0account. Switching up the profile picture may be putting a band-aid on the\u00a0problem, but it does nothing to fix harassment\u00a0in the long run.<\/p>\n<p>Temper continued: \u201cAn abusive\u00a0tweet is an abusive\u00a0tweet, whether it\u2019s next to an egg, a silhouette or a real person\u2019s avatar.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Can changing an avatar really help crack the problem of online abuse?\u00a0 Or is Twitter\u2019s thought process a little scrambled?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twitter is set to drop its default egg avatar in an attempt to encourage users to upload their own images and help fight the association the social network has with online abuse and trolling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":423,"featured_media":101862,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3729,3734],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101859"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/423"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101859"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101943,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101859\/revisions\/101943"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}