A PSA for twits on Twitter

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

Sign up to our newsletter
Security news, advice, and tips.

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.

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

Found this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter or Mastodon to read more of the exclusive content we post.

Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus 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 security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.