In a bid to comply with the European Union’s privacy-centric General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that came into effect on May 25, micro-blogging website Twitter has started banning some accounts belonging to users who were below 13 years of age when they first signed up.
Now according to Twitter, the minimum age for use of their service is 13, no matter where you live. Whether Twitter is planning to clean its service, the platform is not restricting the age as you might believe, instead we believe Twitter is forcing some users which are now over 13 to create brand new accounts.
The way GDPR has forced business entities to sit up and take a serious look at the data that they have been amassing, the banning of the youths is not due to some outrage that Twitter has towards them, but thanks to the EU’s GDPR approach on handling consent, as well as data gathered before the regulation’s start date.
Twitter doesn’t require users enter a birth date when they are signing up, but if you have later entered a birthday indicating they were under 13 when they began tweeting, it presents a problem.
Legally speaking, Twitter must delete the content created by the user before they were 13, but according to Twitter, it can’t separate the content posted before and after ager 13. Twitter says it’s working on a long term solution but has currently decided to ban the account.
According to a screenshot from Canadian journalist Tom Yun, who is older than 13, Twitter notified him that “in order to create a Twitter account, you must be at least 13 years old” and “you don’t meet these age requirements.”
