[jandrese]

Twitter doesn't need some kind of stupid hack of setting a visibile-to-you field to flag an account. Your account got hacked. This doesn't necessary mean they guessed the password, there are other ways to take over a well aged but apparently abandoned account.

[Amezarak]

Yeah, and the bots don't need to set the location to Russia either. In fact, doing so would pretty transparently work against the alleged goals of Russian bot activity on Twitter - if you self-identify as Russian, then you're not posing as an American. I would assume Twitter has separate heuristics for different types of "bots" and flagged it to help make it "clear" to other users that my account was actually a "Russian bot." I don't know.

But again, I don't see the point in taking over an account (please name these other ways of taking one over) and then doing absolutely nothing with it except changing the location. If I'm going to take over aged accounts, why wouldn't I do something with it? How did Twitter identify that the account was hacked, then? Why did they deny my appeal? Why didn't they just ask me to change my password?

[jandrese]

Russian propaganda doesn't exclusively target the US. They also target their own citizens. Plus, we don't know that whomever took over your account was Russian, just that they were prepping it for activity in Russia. After an account is taken over they don't immediately start spamming and get themselves banned. They need to gather thousands of accounts before they launch attacks so the anti-spam bots don't shut them down. You can't effectively multiply a message with just a handful of accounts.

Of course at some point the guy who hacked your account fucked it up and blew a bunch of his accounts. At this point Twitter thinks you're just a bot account and doesn't care what you have to say.

Most common other ways to take over an account involve calling tech support and telling them you lost the password and the email account.

[Amezarak]

For what it's worth, after having this discussion, I logged back into the account. Going to "Apps and devices" shows nothing out of the ordinary.

My country has been reset again to Russia. I had fixed it when it happened the first time.

Yeah, I'm sorry, there's no way it's not Twitter doing this. I'm not sure why so many people here are dead set on the "it must be secret hackers" explanation.

I'm also pretty sure there's not 1-800 Twitter line to call to reset your password, and if Twitter support is giving random people from random emails account access, Twitter has a much bigger problem.