Twitter birth-year hoax locks users out of accounts

[uk666]

Twitter birth-year hoax locks users out of accounts

TWITTER is warning users to be aware of a hoax that claims changing your birth year to 2007 will unlock alternative colour schemes on the network.

Users who do this will be automatically locked out of their accounts due to 13 being the minimum age for having a Twitter account.

Changing a birthday to a date in 2007 would make any user one year two young for the social networking site.

Ahead of the upcoming April Fool’s Day, a prank going viral on the micro-blogging site Twitter is getting users kicked out of the platform for being “underage” to be on the platform.

The prank claims that users who change their birth-year to 2007 on the platform would get access to new profile colour schemes, admin privileges and possibly the blue tick of verification.

Twitter Support took to the platform to alert users about the practical joke.

“We’ve noticed a prank trying to get people to change their Twitter birthday in their profile to 2007 to unlock new colour schemes. Please don’t do this. You’ll get locked out for being under 13 years old,” Twitter Support tweeted on Tuesday.

The micro-blogging site, however, did not disclose where did the prank originate from, how many users actually got locked out of the app and from which regions did maximum or minimum users got fooled.

Early victims of the prank could get in touch with Twitter Support, upload a copy of their government-issued ID and redeem their account, The Verge reported. The hoax has been circulating on Twitter for a few days and one tweet that promotes it has received nearly 20,000 retweets since Monday.

Twitter has been automatically preventing people under 13 from creating an account since May 2018 as it says that the site is "not directed to children."

Due to recently adopted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), companies cannot create contracts of service with anyone under 13 without parental permission within the EU.