You can’t throw a rock egg into the Twittersphere without hitting an anonymous, abusive tweet. Twitter’s solution? Get rid of the egg.

The platform’s rife with harassment, and the service has been under fire for some time now for failing to deal with the torrent of malicious tweets that occur on a daily basis. It’s gotten to the point where the egg avatar, the default avatar for all new accounts, has become synonymous with abusers. This is one of among many reasons that Twitter is now changing the default avatar to a unisex upper body silhouette.

The problem is that this doesn’t combat abuse, it only helps Twitter’s brand. Their reasoning for the change makes sense, but it doesn’t even scratch the core problem.

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

Yes, it is unfair to be lumped in with the bad crowd, but that isn’t a big problem on the social media service. The big problem is the harassment, which doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. You’ve taken away their symbol, but not their power.

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