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Comment by Amezarak | Hacker News Reader

There was literally no account activity other than this. What 'nefarious shit' could it have been used for, given there were no tweets, likes, retweets, follows, DMs, or anything of that nature?

EDIT: I should also add that I have a very strong password which is not reused anywhere, so I doubt very much someone guessed the password.

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It began creating a history for that account based out of Russia. Which would be useful in the future should somebody in--oh, I don't know, Russia--wanted to use that account for nefarious shit.

So, at some point, someone guessed a complex password I used nowhere else, logged into my Twitter account with it, changed the location, and then did....nothing, because they wanted to one day use the account for something. And Twitter somehow figured all this out, determined the account would one day be used for nefarious ends, and suspended the account because...the location changed? Why? Even if the account was hacked (which I see no evidence for), your contention is that what, Twitter suspended my account for logging in from a new IP, but not until after a successful login and profile change?

I'm sorry, it seems a whole lot more likely Twitter used some heuristic to assume the account was a bot, set the location as a marker, and suspended it.

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.

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?

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.

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.

How do you know that content wasn't deleted when your account got suspended?

What type of content were you posting prior to not using the account?

I did not post any content. The only thing I ever did was follow people, mostly writers and friends.

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