104-year-old grandmother gets apology from Facebook for having to lie about her age

Life clearly isn’t easy when you’re 104-years-old, and apparently, that includes being able to share your real age on social media.

Michigan grandmother Marguerite Joseph is an active Facebook user, but because of a strange oversight by the company, isn’t able to put her real age on the social network.

Joseph uses Facebook to keep friends and family up to date on how she’s doing and spend time with her granddaughter, Gail Marlow, who regularly updates Joseph’s Facebook page.

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“All of our family members always asked how grandma was doing on my Facebook page,” Marlow told Click On Detroit. “So I decided I would set up a page of her own so she could stay connected to her family in Canada.

But while Joseph has done a good job of keeping her 109 Facebook friends informed about her day to day life, a strange glitch is preventing her from also sharing her real age. When Marlow tried to set Joseph’s birth year to 1908, it keeps defaulting back to an earlier year. Currently, the oldest available birth year on Facebook is 1910.

“Every time I tried to change the settings to the right year, Facebook always came back with an unknown error message and would send us right back to a year she wasn’t born in,” Marlow said. “I would love to see her real age on Facebook, I mean in April she’s going to be 105. It’s special.”

Joseph has attempted to get around the issue by clarifying in her profile:

“I was actually born on April 19, 1908, but Facebook wouldn’t let me enter in a date that goes back that far.”

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A Facebook spokesperson has addressed the issue, and gave the following statement to Digital Life on TODAY:

“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.”

On the bright side, the centenarian and Ontario native has amassed many more friends due to the publicity of her story. At the time of writing, Joseph was up to 573 friends on her Facebook page. And true to their word, Facebook did indeed fix the error so Joseph's true age now appears, as show in this picture posted yesterday:

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