An update on our nightmarish twitter situation.
Words by Eric Hillis
You may have noticed our twitter account @themoviewaffler has disappeared. Recently twitter have begun requesting accounts add a birth date in order to view the content of certain users. As @themoviewaffler is an account for a website rather than a human being, it obviously has no birth date, so I innocently entered an arbitrary birth date of January 1st, 2000 in the mistaken belief that once twitter saw an age over 18, that would be that.
To my horror, I was immediately greeted with the following message:
Because I entered a birth date of January 1st, 2000, twitter now believes I was nine years old when I set up the account back in 2009 and has locked the account as a result. When I clicked the 'form' link it took me to another screen with an option to fill out another form if the account belonged to a business or organisation, however the link for said form doesn't appear to be working.
Laughably, my only option was to fill out an alternative form and pretend to be my own father, asking twitter that they reinstore my child's account. I uploaded a passport and other ID (not something I'm entirely comfortable with in this age of rampant online security breaches) and received notification that I would receive a reply when they process my form.
A quick twitter search however reveals that I'm merely one of tens of thousands of users who are affected by this issue, so I'm not holding my breath for a resolution.
Hopefully twitter will see sense and bulk restore all the affected accounts, but who knows, as they're impossible to get in contact with.
In the meantime we can be found on twitter at our temporary account @MovieTemp where we'll keep you updated with posts from the site and any news on the status of @themoviewaffler.
Please follow @MovieTemp and thanks for your patience while we await a resolution to this issue. You can also find us on facebook, tumblr, instagram and pinterest.