Last week was a bad week for official anime Twitter accounts because of a weird glitch with Twitter’s age restriction automation. Not only did the official account for Anime News Network get locked due to the age automation rejecting a birthdate change but the official English Hatsune Miku account also ran into trouble for what was sure to be a tense few hours.
According to official Twitter rules, you must be thirteen years old to have an account on the social media service. If you attempt to set your birthdate to something that is below that number, your account will be automatically locked. Unfortunately, a glitch had both of the above-mentioned accounts locked after birthdate changes.
In Anime News Network’s case, they tried to change their birth year to their date of origin in the 90s, while the Hatsune Miku admin attempted to set the account’s birth year to 2007, which is the year that the Hatsune Miku character made her official debut. Both changes triggered the age restriction for some reason and locked the accounts down. Luckily, it seems that the Hatsune Miku account was restored, and the admin was able to take it in stride after the fact, though they also mentioned that they’ve permanently changed the birth year to that of the admin.
thankfully the account lock was resolved while admin was asleep (having nightmares) but now this account's bday is set to admin's bday and cannot be changed
no more balloons for miku 🙁 pic.twitter.com/JxARa6m6h2
— Hatsune Miku (@cfm_miku_en) May 20, 2021
This had to be an embarrassing incident for everyone involved (I think more for Twitter than anyone else), but it’s fortunate that it was resolved so quickly. Maybe Twitter might want to take another look at their inner workings and see why this keeps happening? I know that I’d hate to be an official, verified account and have my account locked down for no real reason other than I wanted to reflect the age of my intellectual property.
For those of you out there who can’t get enough of the virtual idol, don’t forget that she’s already been confirmed to get her own animated series at some point in the future.
Source: Anime News Network
