My Twitter Username was CHANGED by Twitter!

[RR500]

My twitter user name australia was changed by twitter to Australia1_

My original user name has been given to Toursim Australia.

I never saw any correspondence about this from Twitter (I may have deleted it), nor from Tourism Australia.

I have managed to send 2 related support requests to twitter;

Once explaining I couldn't log in - and their reply was;

"The email address you're writing from does not match the email on this account. For privacy reasons, we can't offer any more information about the email."

Second time that my account was suspended - they replied;

"If you're writing in about Australia1_ being suspended, this account is not currently suspended"

I don't believe this can be a trademark issue because you cannot trademark a place name.

I would love an explanation from twitter-

Any tips?

[StreamlineMetrics]

I'm assuming the account was transferred over to Tourism Australia since the account had not tweeted in over a year https://twitter.com/Australia1_. I'm not sure what Twitter's "official" policy is when it comes to handing over usernames, but I've been successful requesting access to inactive accounts in the past. Twitter frowns upon "username squatting" so it's not surprising they turned the account over to someone who would actually use it.

[RR500]

I have logged in and was asked to change passwords... but, no - I wasn't very active with it.

However, if they took it because of inactivity - why did they give me a replacement username?

[StreamlineMetrics]

Well, all they do is switch the names of the accounts. I'm not sure what Tourism Australia's username was before, but Twitter switched their username over to australia and that way Tourism Australia's followers and tweets transferred over automatically. And since Tourism Australia's username is now australia, which was previously your username, then that means your account had to be moved to a new username which in this case turns out to be Australia1_. Unfortunately I don't think there's much you can do about it at this point.