Twitter removed the people I follow

This happened once before when I was using an autofollow script to mass follow people.I had about 800 users I was following and a few minutes later I was locked out of my account. Upon reactivating, the number of users I was following was back down to about 300.

The same thing happened again, after being locked out (didn't use auto-follow this time) the number of users I'm following has been reset to zero.

The strange thing is that the number of followers I have is still intact.

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I'm posting this because I was misinformed by a user on BHW who said that it was impossible for twitter to remove the people I'm following. I thought my mind was playing games with me the first time.

Secondly, I'm wondering what you guys recommend I do to prevent this from happening in the future? Should I buy an aged account? Tone down the spam? I'm trying to follow < 300 per day because my account is new; any other practices you recommend? Thanks

i've had 280 removed by twitter today, i don't buy followers or have fake ones. Seems twitter is on a purge

one of my locked cases

i phone verified the acc 18h later
• lost ~1,5% of my followers who unfollowed me during the down time from 22h
• it had taken ~4 h from 0 back to ~300k following

i know an 1mil acc with different lock cases
4 down peaks in the last 6 month http://twittercounter.com/dakarakoso