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Viral Birth Year Twitter Hoax Will Lock You Out of Account

By Laura Tucker
Viral Birth Year Twitter Hoax Will Lock You Out of Account Featured Image

It’s easy to fall victim to viral suggestions of posting or forwarding text and links with the promise that something great will happen. But the standard cliche that if it sounds too good to be true will almost always apply.

The most recent of those suggestions is most definitely too good to be true and is in fact a hoax. The viral birth year Twitter hoax promises a Twitter advantage if you change your birth year in your profile, but what really happens is you get locked out of your account.

Twitter Hoax

Users of the social media site Twitter are being told not to believe the promise propelling this hoax. A tweet explains, “Damn changing your birth year to 2007 makes your Twitter feed all colourful we been missin out.” That tweet has been retweeted more than 13,000 times.

If you were born in 2007, it makes you, depending on the day, either 11 or 12. But Twitter rules require users to be 13 and above. So after making this change, you get locked out.

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Twitter Support jumped on this with a tweet of their own. “We’ve noticed a prank trying to get people to change their Twitter birthday in their profile to 2007 to unlock new color schemes,” it read. “Please don’t do this. You’ll get locked out for being under 13 years old.”

This was Twitter’s response last year after the General Data Protection Regulation when into effect in the European Union.

Fixing this Problem

If you lose access to your account because of this, you can appeal by logging in and following the prompts for entering the wrong birthday, according to a Twitter representative. Another solution would be to fill out this form.

You’re not wrong to want to spice up your Twitter account and get something extra to make using it a little more fun, but you need to remember that golden rule that if it sounds too good to be true, it is.

And when you really think about it, you’ll realize, it just doesn’t seem to be something Twitter would be offering. Why would they hide something like that under a birth year change?

Did you get caught by this viral birth year Twitter hoax? Were you able to get your account reinstated? Let us know if you were affected in the comments below.

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Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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