(Disclosure of right in the introduction: SB Nation It is part of the Vox Media program, as well the edge; We are all co-workers and friends. I reported this story mostly by talking to my colleagues.)
SB NationThe Twitter account has just over 300,000 followers. Or, at least, it did last Friday. Then, all of a sudden, it disappeared, disappearing from the internet for about a week. When you go to the profile page, the account is replaced with an ominous message: “This account does not exist.” no one in SB Nation He knew how to get it back — and for a while, no one at Twitter did either.
Last Friday, a SB Nation An employee tried to log into the @sbnation account. They were doing this in order to follow @cutwaterspirits, the Twitter account for Cutwater, an adult beverage company that was also sponsoring some SB Nation content. (Following sponsors is pretty normal, especially when you’re tweeting co-branded content.)
When they logged in, they were prompted: Add a birthday to your account – which is weird because that’s the way it is SB NationAnd SB Nation Not a person and does not have a birthday. So the employee did what anyone would do in this situation: He picked something at random. They added 1/1/2000 as a birthday and hit save, and that was the last time anyone would see @sbnation’s Twitter account.
I was able to recreate the situation by logging into a long dormant account of mine and then trying to follow Cutwater. Or Jack Daniel’s. Or Budweiser or Stella Artois or most other adult beverage companies I can think of. As soon as I clicked continue a window popped up telling me to update my profile. In order to follow this account, you will need to include your date of birth on your profile, ensuring that you meet the minimum age requirements.
I ran into a Twitter feature called “Age check,” created by the company in 2012 as a way to make it easier to advertise on Twitter to alcohol companies and the like. The vetting had just one step: New followers had to prove their age by adding their date of birth to their profile.
The age check has only one step: new followers have to prove their age by adding their date of birth to their profile
The account I used was created on June 13, 2009. When I added a date of birth that would have made me over 13 at the time – I chose May 1995, so I would have been 14 – it allowed me to add my date of birth and then follow all the liquor brands I could to find it. But when I went back and changed my birthday to Jan 1, 2000, as soon as I hit save, my account was locked. “Our Terms of Service require that everyone using Twitter be 13 or older,” the page reads, “and we have determined that you did not meet the minimum age at the time this account was created.” I had it apparently I violated Twitter’s age guidelines 14 years ago and I was getting my reward now.
I was directed to a form that asked for my full name, email address, and a photo of my driver’s license. I submitted all of that and got a response that my application has been received. “We usually respond within a few days, but some cases may take a little longer.” By the next morning, my account was restored.
Meanwhile, my account said the same thing SB NationVerb: “This account does not exist.”
This should, in theory, be a relatively straightforward problem. There is a form to fill out and that’s it! Plus, unlike my old account and 21 followers, SB Nation He even has connections on Twitter, the people who run partnerships with companies like Vox Media. “I had no real idea why that was,” Jermaine Spradley says. SB Nationpublisher. “It was like, ‘This has to be something that can be fixed very quickly.'” People have been locked out of their accounts forever, and Twitter always seemed to have a key to getting it working again. Twitter said to SB Nation The team he was working on and then immediately fell silent for about a week.
It was a tough week for a sports blogger to have her main account closed as well. The Final Four took up a weekend, especially the women’s final. It was the opening weekend for Major League Baseball. The NBA Playoffs race was tight. The Masters was coming soon. It’s just such a great time in the sports calendar and it’s hard to leave it out of Sports Twitter. The post has plenty of other Twitter accounts, so it wasn’t completely shut down from the platform, but it hurts to lose the flagship.
The way some within the company see it, there are three things that could be going on here. One is that Twitter — more specifically, its owner, Elon Musk, who has shown some vindictiveness on the platform — has something against it. SB Nation. That seems unlikely. And the second is that there is…a lot going on right now on Twitter. There’s probably a huge waiting list for support, there are thousands fewer people in the company to handle, and everything is moving much more slowly. And the third is that something bigger, more fundamental, is broken, and nobody knows how to fix it.
This Thursday, Twitter representatives finally reached out. They said they don’t have any updates but some context: there is a “bug the team is working through to recalculate”. They did not say what the error was or when it might be resolved. They also did not respond to my DM request for more information.
Late Thursday night, @sbnation suddenly appeared on Twitter. (This happened shortly after my DM, though I obviously can’t prove it had anything to do with it.) Twitter sent out a note alerting the SB Nation team to the account’s return, along with another rather ominous message: No Mayhem with date of birth.
But the biggest question remains. For many, Twitter feels more fragile every day, as new issues appear faster than anyone can figure out how to get rid of them. Some high-profile users and media companies are already on Twitter Blue, and many of the people I spoke with see the platform as a place no longer worth investing in. There is a growing sense among many Twitter users that the company is in the midst of a slow (or perhaps not so slow) decline — and @sbnation may be just one casualty along the way.