Twitter Account of MMORPG Runescape Had to Prove That It Wasn’t Secretly Controlled by an 8-Year-Old. Until Then, It Was Banned
Did you create your social media accounts before your thirteenth birthday? If so, we hope you chose an earlier birth date.
Have you ever been interested in platforms like Facebook or Twitter before you crossed the magical age of thirteen? Have you ever bought a game, lying beforehand about your date of birth? Usually, we enter a random older date, believing that no one will judge us for past events when we reach a certain age.
What, however, in a situation when we don't want to lie and we set up a given account, regardless of the rules? The developers of a certain game learned this the hard way.
23-year-old game faces the consequences
If you are interested in fantasy MMORPGs, you probably know RuneScape. The 2001 game released by Jagex studio, like similar titles, has developed its own social media presence over the years - providing fans with the perfect means to keep up with the latest developments in the fictional world.
Therefore, no one should have been surprised by their concern when they noticed that the official RuneScape profile had disappeared without a trace from Twitter/X. This happened three days ago.
Commenters on the Reddit gaming forum were making speculations about the removal of an active RPG profile in their comments. According to some, Jagex was affected by a purge related to the removal of bots, which have become a sort of plague on Elon Musk's platform - it's hard to feel isolated on Twitter when we're bombarded from all sides with dubious business (and non-business) proposals.
Ultimately, it wasn't the bots that were at fault. RuneScape was banned for using the platform at the age of... eight years old.
Twitter's law works backwards
Similar to other social media, to create an account on Twitter/X, you must be at least thirteen years old. Breaking this rule may result in your profile being deleted, even if this age is exceeded over time. The only option to regain access is by deleting all entries made before the thirteenth birthday.
Of course, this shouldn't happen with company profiles, but as seen in the case of RuneScape, the algorithm operates by its own rules. Danni Amos, a communication specialist, explained the situation via the PC Gamer portal.
X/Twitter flagged the account as having been created by someone who was under the age of 13. This was not the case and, after providing some evidence to X this morning, the account has since been reinstated.
-- Danni Amos
Jagex studio employees set up a RuneScape account in 2009, using 2001 as the birth year because that was the year of the game's release. In theory, the profile was eight years old at that time, which wasn't in line with Twitter/X guidelines. Fortunately, the case had a happy ending, and RuneScape fans can enjoy the MMORPG's tweets again.
