Twitter promises a fix for its age-limit account lockouts

June 13, 2018

Those who recently got locked out of their Twitter accounts for being younger than 13-years-old when they're actually much older may want to keep an eye out for a follow-up email. In a series of tweets, the social network has explained that its system "became aware of accounts that were set up by people when they were younger than 13" after it implemented product changes to comply with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Those accounts were automatically locked, even if it has been years ago since they were created, and Twitter says it didn't expect that to happen at all. Now, the social network has promised to help people affected by the issue get their accounts back.

The social network must have realized after hearing loads of complaints and protests that a lot of affected users aren't in their tweens anymore. Some simply used a random day or the date of their account creation as their birthdays, and the website had no way to know they're actually older teens or adults. Twitter chief Jack Dorsey tweeted that the platform "created some confusion here [and] are working to remedy" it.

While there's a huge chance that those truly older than 13 can access their accounts again, they might still lose a huge chunk of their history. Since anybody younger than 13 is prohibited from tweeting, the fix Twitter is working on includes a technical solution that would allow it to delete all tweets made from the time the user was below the acceptable age limit. While the company didn't mention how people can prevent that from happening in case they were never actually below the age limit, it said it's "reaching out to people impacted with options to unlock their account" over the coming week.

There have been questions and concerns about accounts being locked because of age restrictions. We wanted to let you know what happened here, and what we're doing about it. 1/6
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) June 12, 2018