A 15-year-old high-profile youth ambassador for the Born Free Foundation has been ejected from Twitter's UK headquarters as she tried to confront bosses who suspended her account on a technicality.
Bella Lack, a wildlife and eco blogger, has been barred from using her account, where she has nearly 175,000 followers, leading to accusations of censorship by the platform.
She is one of dozens of teenagers caught up in a wrangle over Twitter's response to new data-protection laws.
Ms Lack and her supporters are raging at the social-media giant that blocked her account yesterday, calling on bosses to reinstate her account, described by MP Zac Goldsmith as “a hugely powerful voice for the natural environment”.
This morning Ms Lack, who is from London, travelled with her mother to Twitter UK’s headquarters and sat in reception, tweeting from a back-up account to company bosses, asking them to come down to talk to her. None of them replied.
But after several hours she and her mother were thrown out.
"The security guard said that the Twitter office had notified him that I was a teenager and therefore could not be there," she told The Independent.
"Even though this seems wholly unreasonable and spurious, we left feeling very dispirited."
Ms Lack said she stood at the barrier at the company's headquarters, asking workers going out for lunch whether they could please help her, but was told this was "against their rules".
Her account was suspended after new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules came into force last Friday. As a result, Twitter decided to suspend the accounts of users who were under the age of 13 – its minimum age threshold - when they signed up for an account.
Dozens of Ms Lack’s followers have contacted Twitter’s support team calling for her to be reinstated so she can “continue to raise awareness of important issues”.
Will Travers, president of the Born Free Foundation, joined calls for her account to be reopened, calling her “an outstanding individual” and offering to verify she is over 13.
“I am SHOCKED and all my followers will be mystified,” he said.
Mr Goldsmith wrote: “This is utterly appalling. @Twitter you are closing down a hugely powerful voice for the natural environment. Why on earth would you do that? You need to reverse this decision.”
Daniel Schneider, a prominent Massachusetts biologist, accused Twitter of censorship, saying it was an outrage. “She posts nothing but #environment-conscious tweets,” he added.
From the back-up account, where she has fewer than 1,000 followers, Ms Lack posted pleas for the decision to be reversed, saying: “My only aim was to protect and preserve our beautiful planet, wonderfully diverse wildlife and amazing animals.”
On her blog, the teenage environmentalist has written about orangutans, zoochosis (stress caused by captivity), palm oil damage and compassion for all animals.
"I’m becoming slightly disillusioned with Twitter at the moment," she said after being turned away.
In the past week, people who were under 13 when they signed up have started receiving notifications that their accounts have been locked and require parental consent to process their data.
The company does not have the tools to separate accounts for those who are now over 13 from those of people who are under that age, so it blocked all the accounts of people who were children on joining – regardless of their age now.
A Twitter source reportedly said the company was working on a more permanent solution for affected users.
