Twitter's fear of GDPR penalty costs users their accounts

By admin On Jun 1, 2018

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The GDPR not only provided a lot of mails, it also makes companies vulnerable that do not follow the rules. Twitter is one of them because according to the GDPR you can only have a profile on social media if you are 13. That matches perfectly well with the demands of Twitter itself. Problem: Twitter never asked a date of birth to users when setting up an account and so it was perfectly possible to set up a Twitter account too young.

You can voluntarily set your date of birth on Twitter and some users have done so after they probably forgot a long time ago that they had created an account too young. In order to do business entirely according to the GDPR’s letter, Twitter has blocked all users who have exposed themselves without any warning, without any good opportunity to reactivate the account.

Not convenient this

Worse: some users were asked by Twitter whether they wanted to add their birth date and immediately got a block on their pants. That is extremely insipid and shows how scared Twitter is for a GDPR fine, which can run into the millions. However, it also shows how unprepared the platform was for this change. An anonymous Twitter employee confirmed Mashable that all these measures are designed to minimize the risk for Twitter.
Users who have had an account for years now have lost everything. The blocked accounts have disappeared completely, as if they were never there, and certainly, the accounts with many followers that happened to them are completely crazy, so you see if you check the hashtag #twitterlockout . It is a tactic of the scorched earth because if there is no account, there can be nothing wrong with it. They were only so proactive with the removal of trolling and hate-searing accounts.

Appeals seem meaningless

For Twitter, it all seems not to be that interesting, because the methods that someone can use to gain access are now being filled by all those users, but even that does not matter. There is a Parental Consent form that you can fill in, but for that, you have to send copies of your passport or driver’s license as well as a birth certificate or other proof that your parents are your parents and you can speak to Twitter. Users have done so reluctantly, but that does not seem to help either.
It seems that Twitter wants to avoid any form of blame and therefore cut down with the blunt ax. The lack of response from the company is illustrative now that everyone is asking questions: everyone who is now well above the age limit just wants their account back, but that is a risk for Twitter and that is not going to happen.

Back to

It seems that everyone who happened to this has to start over. You can not blame them if they consider doing so on another platform, because how Twitter deals with this story so far is outrageous. And that while the social media platform already has so much trouble to bind younger users. As it turns out, all information on the internet can be used against you by companies that only think of their own skin.