Earlier this week, the official Runescape Twitter/X account got banned. It’s since returned, but the reason behind its temporary ban was that someone at the social media company thought the account was created by an eight-year-old kid, which would be a violation of Twitter’s rules.
On Monday, the official Twitter account for F2P MMORPG Runescape—with over 320k followers—was quietly removed from the site. Fans online weren’t sure what happened, leading some to spedculate it was because of the account using bots or possibly due to a hack. All anybody knew was that suddenly, with no warning, Elon Musk’s social media hellsite had banned the official Runescape account. Interestingly, official Twitter accounts for Old School Runescape and developer Jagex remained up. So what actually happened? Well, you can blame this on a joke on the account’s profile when it was created 15 years ago.
As first reported by PC Gamer on February 28, the official Runescape Twitter account was banned because when the profile was created in 2009, Jagex used Runescape’s launch year—2001—as the date of birth. That made it seem like the account was created and run by an eight-year-old child. Twitter has a policy that says you must be 13 years or older to use the social media network. Interestingly, even if you are much older than 13, if your account was created when you were younger, you can still be punished and banned. Jagex’s senior communications manager Danni Amos confirmed this was the reason for the ban.
“X/Twitter flagged the account as having been created by someone who was under the age of 13,” Amos told PC Gamer. “This was not the case and, after providing some evidence to X this morning, the account has since been reinstated.”
According to Twitter’s policy page, users who created an account when they were under 13 years old can get their account back, but the social media company must first wipe away any of the tweets you posted before you were officially old enough to tweet.
Checking Runescape’s tweets from back in the day, it seems stuff from 2012 is still around, so it seems they didn’t have to scrub all their past tweets pre-2014. Probably because the account was created by adults working at a video game studio and wasn’t made by a kid.
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