Wife of computer scientist Hal Finney, recently revived his Twitter account in lieu of information that Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, could delete the account and information therein due to inactivity.
On December 16, a large number of Crypto Twitter users noticed that Finney’s account had activity for the first time in more than 12 years. Some others hypothesized that a hacker may have taken over the Bitcoin pioneer’s account and its more than 71,000 fans, but Fran stepped in right away to put the rumors to rest.
“I am tweeting for Hal […] to avoid his account being purged by Elon,” said Fran
It’s uncertain if Fran Finney’s involvement will be able to keep the crypto pioneer active on social media. Musk asserted his support for free expression as “the backbone of a functioning democracy” in the midst of his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, which was finalized in October.
But on December 15, the social media site removed a number of accounts run by prominent journalists at organizations including CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, all at Musk’s direction.
Accounts that followed the movements of Musk’s private planes and promoted Mastodon, a social networking site that gained popularity after the billionaire took over Twitter, were also suspended. The former “doxxed my specific location in real-time,” according to the CEO of Twitter.
As Twitter’s CEO, Musk supervised a series of contentious choices that led many in the business world to doubt his economic sense. He sought to charge users for “confirmed” blue check marks, which resulted in a large number of phony accounts with a convincing appearance of validity.
He also dismissed numerous senior executives, including many members of the platform’s content moderation staff. A rise in tweets with hate speech and inaccurate information on vaccines was also seen on the social media site, endangering advertising income.
The majority of Twitter users seemed to endorse Fran Finney’s attempts to demonstrate that the account was still active and helpful to the cryptocurrency community. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, also commented on the matter, expressing astonishment at the account’s reactivation.
On Hal Finney’s account, Twitter user 0xAphelion wrote, “There should be a mechanism of protecting accounts of historical importance.” But it’s better to be secure.
One of the first to react to Satoshi’s post on the cypherpunks mailing list, Hal Finney was one of the most well-known figures in the cryptosphere. At the age of 58, he went away from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, widely known as Lou Gehrig’s illness.
