A problem that keeps popping up in the online communities for digital charity people: Twitter asking accounts to enter a date of birth and then locking people out.
For charity accounts, some social media managers have entered their organisation’s founding date as the date of birth – but if that date makes your account under 13 years old at any point in Twitter’s existence, the account will get locked. People under 13 years of age are not allowed on Twitter. Some are finding themselves permanently locked out despite appealing to Twitter’s support (which effectively no longer exists); others have got their accounts back but finding all the tweets that were posted ‘before they were 13’ have been deleted.
If you do get asked for a date of birth on Twitter, proceed with care. Probably the best thing to do is enter the date of birth of one of your digital team, but only use someone who turned 13 well before Twitter was founded in 2006. And keep a careful record of the date that was entered; Digital Charity Lab’s free account management toolkit includes a template for tracking this kind of info about your accounts.
Of course, there’s an ongoing conversation about whether non-profits should come off Twitter entirely, given its role in stoking race hate. Ben Matthews of Empower has a good article about the current state of Twitter and what charities need to consider. What are your thoughts – are you considering an ‘X’-odus from Twitter?