Update: This night I got a new mail from Twitter saying that I might actually be able to get my account, including tweets, back. And I actually got a link to a reactivation page where I only needed to confirm my name and phone number. So that's great and more like how I would have expected it to work from the beginning. I'm not sure though whether their automated process for handling these issues is poorly designed and is supposed to work like this. Or if there's some kind of manual review step that needs to be done for these cases, before they tell you it might be possible to just unlock the account.
I'm happy that it seems like it might get resolved, but it remains an extremely poor user experience.
Twitter is a popular platform among many web developers, myself included, which is why I want to share an important lesson I learned today: don't try to correct past mistakes in order to be honest, and never forget anything you did before you turned 13, you WILL be punished
What follows is a text full of self pity where I'm whining about Twitters policy to punish and never forgive in the name of GDPR. You'll most likely want to go read an other DEV post.
I've had my @jimutt Twitter account for a pretty long time. But I didn't actually start using it actively until the last couple of years. I've been slightly annoyed by the fact that my Twitter account's date of birth has been incorrect. I'm born 1994 but on Twitter it said 1993.
So, as a victim of my own stupidity I thought "Why not change the year to be correct and honest". And so I did, thinking that I'd probably misclicked during the account creation and selected the wrong year. I changed it and didn't get any kind of warning about what would happen next; immediately after changing my birth date my account was locked and made completely inaccessible. The reason stated was the fact that Twitter is only available for people who are 13 years or older. And that they suspect I was under 13 when I created my account. I don't know if it's true or not, because I don't remember which websites I signed up for 12 years ago, but I'll trust that they hopefully at least have got my account registration date correct.
What I fail to see is why locking the account of a, now 24 year old, adult is to be considered the preferred choice. Wouldn't it make a little more sense to perhaps delete the tweets (if any) I made as 12 year old? Guess not..
Now I've read that they've started to reactivate some accounts that has been locked because of an invalid age. But if there is to be any chance at all to get my account reactivated I guess I at the very least will need to trust them with a copy of my driving license. With my small amount of followers I'll probably just create a new one though, and make sure to be very careful when touching my account settings in the future. 🙄
Rant over!
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