Twitter Ditches Default Egg Profile Photo
Phillipp Schneeberger
Regardless, people have come to associate the circle head with masculinity, and because of this association, we felt that it was important to explore alternate head shapes. We reviewed many variations of our figure, altering both the head and shoulders to feel more inclusive to all genders. When the shoulders were wider, the image felt overly masculine, so we decreased the width of the shoulders and adjusted the height of the figure. As a result of these iterations, we ended with a more gender-balanced figure. We chose grays because they feel temporary, generic, and universal. With that, we included a higher contrast color combination to make this image accessible for those with visual impairments. Because of its coloring, the new profile photo also gives less prominence to accounts with a default profile photo.
All new Twitter users start with the same profile picture: a white cartoon egg on a colorful background. But over the years, the images known as "eggs" have gotten a pretty bad rap. They're often associated with Twitter trolls (though not ALL are), as people often create dummy profiles for the express purpose of harassing other people, and don't change the default settings.
The company says it settled on gray for the new images, as opposed to the bright colors that accompanied the egg profile photos, for a particular reason. "We explored gray, generic images to communicate that this profile photo is intended to be temporary," it says. After settling on an image of a person's figure, the company analyzed ways to keep the figure inclusive in terms of gender.
Of course, there is no suggestion changing the appearance of the avatar will discourage trolls from abusing others. Twitter has acknowledged it has a major issue in the amount of users who use the platform purely to engage in this kind of behaviour, and has introduced a raft of new features in recent months, including the ability for users to block certain keywords, such a swear words or racial slurs, and to mute users with default profile pictures.
While many online trolls would gravitate towards an image from popular culture or other subcultures, the default egg avatar is still one of the most frequently seen profile types and has been extensively analysed.
"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.
On Friday, Twitter introduced a new default profile picture, switching from the well-known egg to a simple human silhouette. Twitter hopes this change will encourage users to replace the default image with a real photo of themselves, dissuading people from remaining anonymous or being associated with trolls.
Also late on Sunday night, Musk changed his profile picture to the company's new logo, which he described as "minimalist art deco," and changed his Twitter bio to "X.com," which now redirects to twitter.com.
"This has created an association between the default egg profile photo and negative behaviour, which is not fair to people who are still new to Twitter and have not yet personalised their profile photo," Twitter wrote in a blog post.
Other differences between the old and new platforms include a more stable performance, new video playback experience, faster and easier navigation, updated personalized recommendations, an additional premium option with 4K Ultra HD resolution, a default kids profile with parental control, more profile avatar options, new ad formats and more accessibility features.
Because you know scammers are going to misuse and abuse this feature. They already steal images for profile photos, and one common trick is to image-search those photos to find out who the real people are. Or if it's a scam, since if not a stolen profile photo, a stock image. Well, not anymore, I guess.
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