A woman in Minnesota who turns 114 years old today (Happy birthday!) had to lie about her age recently. No, not because she wanted to appear younger, and not because she doesn’t want to admit she was born before every home had a telephone and flying hunks of metal called airplanes got people from here to there. She was trying to sign up for Facebook, which only allows for users 99 and younger.
A supercentenarian named Anna has been in the news lately, after a story about how her 85-year-old son mentioned her while buying in iPhone resulted in her trying to get hip with the social media age on KARE 11 (link has video that autoplays).
The salesman who helped out her son was interested to hear that he had a 113-year-old mother, and he ended up befriending her, teaching her about iPads, FaceTime and Facebook.
But when she went to sign up on the social network, the age option only scrolls back to the year 1905, making her 1900 birth year just out of range. So she lied. She now as an account and 31 friends — there’s even some kind of odd “Public Figure” page listed for her that appears to be a fake.
In the meantime, her new friend helped her write a letter to send to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on a typewriter to see if something can be done about the age limits as they stand.
“I’m still here,” Anna dictated.
Last year when another supercentenarian complained of not being able to create a Facebook account at the age of 104, the company said in a statement (via NPR):
“We’ve recently discovered an issue whereby some Facebook users may be unable to enter a birthday before 1910. We are working on a fix for this and we apologize for the inconvenience.”
Keep rolling that back, guys. All the cool kids want to get online.
Days from 114th birthday, MN woman gets tech savvy [KARE 11]
At 113, Woman Lies About Her Age So She Can Join Facebook [NPR]
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
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