Too young to tweet? Twitter shut down CRA's account over its 'birth date,' records show

Misery might love company, but bureaucracy doesn't seem to relish bureaucracy.

The social media team at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) — the second-biggest government agency or department in the country after the military — found out firsthand what it can be like to jump through red tape when its Twitter and Facebook accounts were temporarily blocked several times in recent years for various reasons, including a decision by Twitter that the CRA was underage.

Civil servants had to navigate the social media juggernauts' client-service maze, which included requests for copies of personal ID or phone bills, in order to restore account access.

The CRA's English-language account on Twitter (now formally called X) has 260,000 followers and tweets on average eight to nine times a day; on Facebook, the agency has 136,000 followers for its English-language page. CRA uses both accounts to send out such information as tax deadlines, instructions on how to claim credits and warnings about the latest scams.

The suspensions of those accounts are captured in email exchanges from March 2018 to July 2022, made public through a request under the Access to Information Act.

"Urgent: CRA account gone!" reads the subject line of a July 4, 2022, email from CRA social media manager Crystallina Chiu to someone at Twitter, whose name is blanked out in the records released by the agency.

The email said that CRA staff couldn't read some tweets directed at the agency in recent days because Twitter's algorithms determined the user on their account "wasn't old enough."

"So, we changed our date of birth to November 1st, 1999, and now our account has been deleted?" Chiu wrote.

A number of emails went back and forth about problems filing a help ticket, before Twitter asked the CRA's social media team to have someone submit proof of age in the form of their government ID or health card.

"I'm not super comfortable with sharing my/my team members' IDs for a work-related account," Chiu wrote back, about 2.5 hours after the CRA lodged its "urgent" help request.

In a subsequent email, Chiu asked if the date of birth could be removed. "We were trying to be cheeky and give our date of birth as the Canada Revenue's anniversary date." (The Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, later renamed the Canada Revenue Agency, was created on Nov. 1, 1999).

The Twitter staffer who replied said they had "no idea."

Eventually, Chiu agreed to submit a copy of a driver's licence to restore access.

The next morning, the CRA regained access to its Twitter account. But its social media team quickly noticed a new problem: Because the newly approved "birth" date on the account was in November 1999, almost all of the hundreds of tweets from 2010, 2011 and early 2012 were missing because of Twitter's age requirement that all users be at least 13 years old.