Update 2: This morning my account was restored. Yay! It appears it was human error. Go figger.
Update: Apparently I am not alone. It seems there has been a sudden influx of suspended accounts. So something is awry with Twitter. It’s not me.
Suddenly, this afternoon, I stopped receiving tweets in my desktop application (Tweetdeck). So I went to Twitter.com and lo and behold my account has been suspended. Say what? I hadn’t even posted anything today. 
That says: “This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity. If we have suspended your account mistakenly, please let us know. See Suspended Accounts for more information.”
So, I quickly wrote to Support and got an automated reply. In case you’re wondering, here’s the reasons they give for suspending an account:
If you are suspended, it’s most likely for one or more of these reasons::
User Abuse
* a large number of people block the profile or write in with spam complaints
* aggressive following
* imbalanced ratio: the number of followers is small compared to number of people following
* misuse of the reply feature
* updates consist of duplicate links and/or text
* updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
* updates consist of updates poached from others’ timelines, passed off as one’s ownTechnical Abuse
* updates consist of links pointing to phishing sites, malware, or other harmful material
* a large number of accounts is created in a short amount of time
* an account is identified as belonging to a spam cluster
I obviously hadn’t done any of these things. So, I waited a while but got no further correspondence. I checked the support page and it said my issue had been resolved! Except it hadn’t. Still suspended. So, I wrote another message in reply, re-opening my support ticket. 2 hours later, as of this posting, I’m still untwittered. Kind of an uncomfortable position to be in as I’m doing a talk on social media this week…There goes the live demo of Twitter.
Hey c’mon. you don’t actually read all of that stuff, do you?
Uh. That Twitter Feed is from my Twitter account.
I just read on the sidebar Twitter feed:
“Today at five minutes and six seconds after 4 PM, the time and date will be 04:05:06 07/08/09.”
I wondered if I mentioned it to Bob, he might not even know what I’m jabbering about. It’s gotten to the point where you can read about things on blogs, and the blog author might not even know about it.
In the future, everything will be blamed on algorithms.
In this case I believe the suspensions are related to an algorithm issue in the Twitter service. If so, the suspensions are programmatic and not an action taken by a Twitter employee. I’m happy to report that my account has been restored. I have yet to receive a response form an actual person that would explain why I was suspended, nor why the account was restored.
I had something like that happen to me with Ebay.
I rarely used Ebay. Then a couple years ago I went to log in and it said my account was frozen or some such. I tried their support system and got an e-mail much like the one you got with a number of reasons my account could of been frozen, none of which I did. They seemed to be saying I misused their service.
Probably a year later I opened an Ebay account using a different e-mail address. I went to my old username’s feedback page and there was still the same feedback that was there last time I logged in to that account. All of them were good except one Neutral (a result of me rating someone I bought something from as Neutral because he wouldn’t accept PayPal- paybacks are a bitch).
Wouldn’t I have some bad feedback if I was misusing the service? Only thing I can figure is, the year before I noticed my account frozen I had received a number of e-mails that looked like they were Ebay bid notices. I hadn’t bid on anything- hadn’t even been on Ebay during that time- so I figured they were phishing e-mails and ignored them. Maybe someone bid on items using my account somehow and didn’t pay for them? Still, if they did, why wouldn’t I have negative feedback on my account?