2007 Birthday Twitter Prank

About

2007 Twitter Birthday Prank refers to a hoax in which people encourage others to change the year of their birth on Twitter to 2007 in order to see colors unique to people that age. However, the result of changing one's birth year to 2007 causes the site to suspend the account, as Twitter requires its users to be a minimum age of 13.

Origin

While the post starting the hoax is unknown, the earliest known reference to the prank was posted March 24th, 2019 by user @horrifcs^[1] (shown below).

That day, two other people posted encouraging others to change their birthday to 2007: @hayleyerin and @killthisloves (shown below).

Spread

Over the following days, the prank began growing more widespread. Popular tweets pushing the prank from March 25th, 2019 include tweets by @s_rxii, which gained over 22,000 retweets and 37,000 likes (shown below, left), and @buteracypher, which gained over 620 retweets and 1,800 likes (shown below, right).

The spread of the prank caused Twitter to make a statement, in a since deleted tweet that read "We’ve noticed a prank trying to get people to change their Twitter birthday in their profile to 2007 to unlock new color schemes. Please don’t do this. You’ll get locked out for being under 13 years old."^[2] The prank was covered by The Verge, Mashable,^[3] and 9to5Mac.^[4]

Search Interest

External References