Hal Finney’s Wife Resumes Activity on Bitcoin Pioneer’s Twitter Account to Avoid Potential Purge

Twitter suspended a number of accounts, including those controlled by high-profile journalists and the social networking platform Mastodon, under Elon Musk’s leadership.

Fran Finney, the wife of computer scientist Hal Finney, who received Satoshi Nakamoto’s first transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, reactivated her late husband’s Twitter account amid fears that Twitter CEO Elon Musk would delete the content due to inactivity.

On December 16, many Crypto Twitter users reported that Finney’s account had activity for the first time in more than 12 years. Some speculated that a hacker had taken control of the Bitcoin pioneer’s account and its over 71,000 followers, but Fran quickly debunked the rumors.

“I’m tweeting for Hal […] to keep his account from being purged by Elon,” Fran explained.

It remains to be seen whether Fran Finney’s intervention will save the crypto pioneer’s social media presence. During Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October, he stated that free speech is “the bedrock of a functioning democracy.”

However, under Musk’s leadership, the social media platform purged a number of accounts controlled by high-profile journalists from CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post on December 15. Accounts tracking Musk’s private flight movements and promoting Mastodon, a social networking platform that has drawn many Twitter users since the billionaire’s takeover, were also suspended. The former “doxxed my exact location in real-time,” according to the Twitter CEO.

Before the acquisition of Twitter, Musk had a net worth of more than $300 billion in October 2021, and Tesla stock reached an all-time high of $407.36 in November 2021. In roughly a year, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index revealed that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had fallen to the world’s second richest person, with a reported net worth of $169 billion at the time of publication.

As CEO of Twitter, Musk oversaw a number of contentious decisions that had many in the business world questioning his judgment. He fired many top executives, including many members of the platform’s content moderation team, and tried to charge users for “verified” blue check marks, resulting in a slew of bogus accounts with a semblance of legitimacy. The social media platform also experienced an increase in tweets containing hate speech and vaccine misinformation, putting advertisers’ revenue at risk.

Twitter users appeared to overwhelmingly support Fran Finney’s efforts to demonstrate that the account was still active and useful to the crypto community. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also expressed his surprise at the account’s reactivation on the platform.

“There should be a way to protect historical accounts,” said Twitter user 0xAphelion on Hal Finney’s account. “However, it’s better to be safe.”