A PSA for twits on Twitter

Surprise! If you tell Twitter you’re under 13 years old, they’ll lock your account.

A Twitter PSA for twits

It’s amazing that a public service announcement like this even has to be made:

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

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 26, 2019

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Twitter’s support team felt the need to warn users not to fall for a prank that told them Twitter’s user interface would offer them new colours if they told the service they were born in 2007, after a wave of users locked themselves out of their accounts.

Twitter, like many other services, doesn’t allow underage users to sign-up for their site.

I don’t know what’s a poorer reflection on society – that people didn’t realise the implication of claiming they were 12 years old, or that they were lured by something as daft as a new colour scheme.

Twitters

Of course, some good might have come out of it if certain people had been locked out of their Twitter accounts.

Trump twit

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

2 comments on “A PSA for twits on Twitter”

  1. Etaoin Shrdlu

    Does every single news item have to be turned into a political rant? And always from the same perspective, too.

    1. Graham cluleyGraham Cluley · in reply to Etaoin Shrdlu

      It was hardly a political rant. I was just quoting someone else's tweet.

      And it *was* funny. I like to share a little humour from time to time, and we all know that Donald Trump likes a good joke. I'm sure he and his supporters can see the funny side.

      (If you want rants, you should see me get started on Brexit…)

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