A hoax on Twitter is tricking people into locking themselves out of their own accounts by luring claiming there is a “special” version of Twitter for users who are 12 years old.
Messages on Twitter urge readers to go into their account settings and change their date of birth to 2007 because – according to many messages – you can unlock a new color scheme that is designed for the site’s 12 year old users.
It’s a prank though, and a malicious one at that, since doing so will lock you out of your Twitter account. That’s because 12 year olds (and under) are not allowed to use the social network, who have a minimum age requirement of 13 years.
As such, Twitter users will lose all access to their accounts until their “date of birth” reaches 13 years of age.
Sponsored Content. Continued below...
Given the numerous tweets from angry Twitter users about this, and the fact that Twitter Support had to tweet out a message asking their users not to change their date of birth, it’s pretty clear that plenty of people fell for this!
We’ve noticed a prank trying to get people to change their Twitter birthday in their profile to unlock new color schemes. Please don’t try this. We don’t have different color schemes based on your birthday.
If you fell for it, you’ll need to contact Twitter support, and there is a good chance you’ll need to have some sort of identification handy, as Twitter are likely to ask for it.