Here's why Twitter's locking people out of their accounts

It's been just a few days since Europe's GDPR rules went into effect and the regulations have already had a pretty disastrous effect on a large number of Twitter users.

Over the past week, the company's been suspending the accounts of people who joined Twitter before they were 13 -- even if they're now older -- due to new European privacy laws.

It's not clear just how many accounts have been affected, but a look at the r/Twitter subreddit and the #TwitterLockout hashtag shows a substantial number of users have reported suspensions in recent days. VentureBeat also reports that at least one business account, which had listed a "birthdate" as the company's founding date, had also been suspended.

Users are reporting receiving emails and notifications from Twitter alerting them that their accounts can no longer be accessed. Some have reported the suspensions have immediately followed a prompt to add their birthdate to their profile.

A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the record, but Mashable has confirmed the lockouts are a direct result of the company's implementation of GDPR guidelines. For those suspended from their accounts, the best bet for now is to start fresh, a burden many may not want to shoulder for a platform already losing younger users to competitors like Snapchat.

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Unlike Facebook and other social platforms, Twitter doesn't require users to share a birthdate when they sign up, and though the company's always mandated users be at least 13, it's never done a whole lot to enforce the rule. Some users, for example, were under the age of 13 when they joined Twitter and later added their birthdate to their profile a few years later.

This became a problem when GDPR rolled around last week. Under the guidelines, companies are required to enforce a minimum age requirement of at least 13. This put Twitter in the position of having to figure out what to do with all that content it now knows was generated by underaged users.

Twitter's solution: to suspend the accounts of all those users.

Needless to say, this has been incredibly frustrating for the many, now adult, Twitter users who had their accounts suspended without warning. Making matters worse, Twitter hasn't done a very good job at communicating with these users about what, if anything, the can do to regain access to their accounts.

On Reddit, many users are reporting that Twitter's now asking for age verification in the form of an I.D or birth certificate. Some have reported regaining access to their accounts that way, while others report their emails to Twitter support have gone largely unanswered.

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That Twitter would take what feels like an overly aggressive approach in the name of GDPR compliance is not necessarily surprising: GDPR violations can rack up astronomical fines pretty quickly, and many companies have resorted to overly broad policies in the short term.

But what's more alarming is the fact that Twitter, which had ample time to prepare for GDPR and inform users about these changes, didn't do anything to make users aware of these issues.

It also serves as yet another reminder that you're probably better off sharing as little personal data with social media platforms as possible. When Twitter added the ability for users to add their birthdays to their profiles in 2015, it was billed as a fun way to make "sharing these personal celebrations even easier."

Now, though, the decision to share something as innocuous as a birthdate is coming back to haunt people who likely thought little about the fact that they had skirted Twitter's age requirements upon signup.