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.

Twitter wanted CRA’s proof of age

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.

Chiu once again emailed Twitter: “We’re not ACTUALLY only 22. We’re a government organization. Are we able to reinstate that first year’s tweets from 2010-2012 until Twitter thinks we turned 13? Is there a way to mark this as an organization account rather than a person?”

Someone from the social media company replied, “Just give it 48 hours for the account to settle down before looking for those older tweets.”

The tweets never did reappear.

‘Every social media strategist’s nightmare’

The email exchanges between the CRA and Twitter were initially obtained in November by an unknown requester under the federal Access to Information Act.

The emails are included in a new database of tens of thousands of previously released federal government documents made public on Tuesday by the Investigative Journalism Foundation, a Canadian non-profit newsroom that has published a series of databases of public-interest records since it launched last year. The IJF gave CBC News early access to its latest effort.

• Browse Open By Default, the IJF’s database of previously released access-to-information records

In an emailed response to questions on Monday evening, the CRA acknowledged the Twitter incident, the arbitrary decision to choose a birth date in 1999 and the deletion of its posts that ensued.

“The CRA has not attempted to adjust the date of birth” once again, the statement said. “Given the fact that tax information changes regularly, there is limited business value in reinstating social media content from 2012. As such the CRA did not attempt to do so.”

Messages to Twitter’s press email address seeking comment received the company’s automatic reply, “Busy now, please check back later.”

Katrina German, a technology expert at Ethical Digital, a Saskatoon-based digital marketing agency, said suspension of the CRA’s Twitter account “is every social media strategist’s nightmare,” but ultimately the agency got lucky because someone at Twitter realized they were dealing with a big organization that needed immediate help.

“Small businesses can have one heck of a time connecting with anybody real at Facebook or Twitter,” she said in an interview. “Sometimes their accounts are just removed. I’ve had a lot of cases with clients where it’s crickets — we get no response in return.”

Facebook issues

The emails in the IJF’s database show it wasn’t just Twitter: The CRA was locked out of its Facebook pages several times, too. The first time was in March 2018, when the agency’s social media team was “urgently trying to gather some stats for a media product that came out slamming our FB posts.”

After a few Facebook employees bounced the request for help to other colleagues, it emerged that the CRA lost the ability to post on its own page because its staff had created a fake, nameless profile to manage the page, which goes against Facebook’s policies.

The CRA regained access, but the same problem popped up again in late 2021, when the agency wanted to post some job ads. After a procession of emails with Facebook’s help team and some failed attempts at two-factor authentication via a phone call, Facebook’s algorithm automatically blocked the CRA’s ability to publish and manage ads.

“It is actually against our policy to use fake/inauthentic profiles on our platform and/or to manage pages with them,” someone at Facebook wrote to a CRA senior marketing adviser, warning that the same snafu could happen again because “we are cracking down on the creation and use of inauthentic profiles.”

It took a week for the CRA to regain the ability to publish ads. Its job-recruiting posts were delayed as a result.

The CRA, in its statement on Monday, acknowledged it had created what it called a “content management account” using a generic CRA email to initially set up its Facebook pages, but it denied ever using “an account with a fake name” to then manage those pages.

Luc Lefebvre, an IT security specialist and co-founder of the information security and privacy non-profit Crypto.Québec, said Facebook — unlike Twitter — doesn’t generally allow a company to have a single login to administer its business’s page, and it’s a problem.

“Employees shouldn’t have to log in personally to manage these pages themselves,” he said in an interview in French. Lefebvre said every time a worker with access to the company Facebook page quits, for example, the company has to quickly rejig the permissions so that the ex-employee doesn’t deface the page.

“It’s not the CRA’s fault. They just want to use social media,” he said.

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