Twitter hatches plan to defeat trolls, by dropping its egg icon

The egg icon that for years marked profiles of new Twitter users was gone Monday, in an effort to deter “trolls” who often hid behind them to launch anonymous online attacks.

For seven years, anyone who created a Twitter account automatically got an egg icon as their profile picture, which they were then invited to customise with images of their own.

“This was a playful way to reference how eggs hatch into birds that send all the Tweets you see on Twitter!” the San Francisco-based one-to-many messaging service said in an online post.

Some people left the eggs as their profile images for the fun of it, but “trolls” who created accounts just to fire off abusive comments were known to leave eggs unchanged as well.

“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,” Twitter said.