Casey Newton, writing for The Verge:

President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, @realdonaldtrump, disappeared from the site for around 11 beautiful minutes shortly before 7PM ET. It was not initially clear what happened to the account, and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a series of tweets issued by Twitter’s Government and Elections team, the company first blamed “human error,” then attributed the move on a rogue employee who used their last day on the job to boot the president off the service.

It was one of the best 11 minute stretches of 2017.

Brooklyn Vegan:

Twitter accounts for The FADER, Pigeons & Planes, 2DopeBoyz, and HipHop-N-More all appeared as suspended simultaneously today. Navjosh, editor of HipHop-N-More, explained that the suspensions were because Atlantic Records filed complaints with Twitter after the sites posted the track list to Young Thug’s new album, Beautiful Thugger Girls, before its release.

This is absurd if true.

Twitter is getting rid of the egg avatar. Harry McCracken, writing at Co.Design:

Starting today, however, the egg is history. Twitter is dumping the tarnished icon for a new default profile picture–a blobby silhouette of a person’s head and shoulders, intentionally designed to represent a human without being concrete about gender, race, or any other characteristic. Everyone who’s been an egg until now, whatever their rationale, will automatically switch over.

I’m super excited to have these weird Dot candy looking silhouettes call me names.

Sarah Jeong, writing for Motherboard:

Twitter has rolled out its new @-replies to me about three or four times now, ambushing me with its unspeakable badness on the iPhone app or web Twitter. Today it rolled out for everyone and it makes me want to throw all my devices at a wall.

Thank god for Tweetbot, because this is horrible.

Twitter is once again rolling out new features to try and curb abuse on their platform. Kurt Wagner, writing at Recode:

There’s a general theme to all of these changes: Keep mean or abusive content out of sight. It’s the same approach Twitter used in August when it rolled out a feature so users could filter their notifications.

I dunno, I feel like there’s some low hanging fruit still out there. Like banning Nazis.

Twitter is finally rolling out some new anti-harassment tools. Buzzfeed has a good look at what probably would have been nice to have before Nazi-frogs took over the platform during the election:

As such, Twitter also announced it will add a new “hateful conduct” reporting option (when users report an “abusive or harmful” tweet, they’ll now see an option for “directing hate against a race, religion, gender, or orientation”). Similarly, the company is adding new “extensive” internal training for its support teams that deal with hateful harassment. According to the company, its Safety team support staff will undergo “special sessions on cultural and historical contextualization of hateful conduct” as well as refresher programs that will track how hate speech and abuse evolve on the platform (a necessary step, as many trolls have begun to create their own hateful code language with which to bypass traditional censors and filters).

The Verge:

Twitter is about to make a big change to the way that tweets work, The Verge can independently confirm. Beginning September 19th, the company will cut down on exactly which types of content count toward the platform’s 140-character limit. Media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, etc.) and quoted tweets will no longer reduce the count. The extra room for text will give users more flexibility in composing their messages.

I’m ready for this.

Jim Weber, writing on LinkedIn:

I had read that the IOC was banning the press from using GIFs but I didn’t see how that applied to me. Sure, I didn’t have the rights to any footage at the Olympics — just like countless blogs and users don’t have rights to the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and NCAA footage that they create GIFs out of and profit from every day.

But I figured the worst thing that would happen is the GIF would be deleted from my account, as Twitter often does in these situations.

Boy was I wrong.

Twitter has finally rolled out some content filters to help curb abusive behavior on the service.

When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior. Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with – and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings.