Prominent Bitcoin-focused Twitter accounts suspended for hours

The Twitter profiles of multiple major cryptocurrency influencers and Bitcoin (BTC) proponents were suspended and reactivated later today.

“What Bitcoin Did” podcast host Peter McCormack called out three of the most prominent accounts suspended: blockchain data analyst Willy Woo’s @woonomic, Bitcoin miner and market commentator The Crypto Dog, and Bitcoin stock-to-flow model creator PlanB’s 100trillionUSD.

Several others were suspended, including @mmcrypto, @wsbchairman, @themooncarl.

News began at 2:25 a.m., when PlanB tweeted, “Just woke up to see my account suspended and all 300k followers gone. No explanation from twitter, no dm, nothing. Does anybody know what happened? More accounts having this problem? @twitter, @twittersupport, @jack HELP!!!”

Three minutes later, it was restored and his followers had been reinstated, prompting PlanB to say, “Well, that was fast.”

An hour after that, PlanB tweeted out that Twitter Support had sent a notice explaining that its systems flag spam accounts in bulk, and that his had accidentally been added to a purge. 

But, he added, “Note that victims of scammers and impersonators think it is us and report the real accounts.”

A better solution, PlanB said, would be to reinstate the verification procedure that gives prominent accounts a blue check mark—something McCormack has. The process has become both very limited and very opaque in recent years, with the verifications controlled entirely by Twitter.

Woo later tweeted that his account had been down for about six hours, and that he’d received the same support notice.

While a few Twitter users suggested that it was a targeted action meant to silence cryptocurrency proponents, that was widely seen as very unlikely, given that Dorsey himself is a Bitcoin proponent who’s other company, Square, recently followed MicroStrategy into a major Bitcoin investment.

Square bought more than 8,000 Bitcoins in two buys in October 2020 and this February—investing about 5% of its treasury, according to a release.

“Square believes that cryptocurrency is an instrument of economic empowerment, providing a way for individuals to participate in a global monetary system and secure their own financial future,” the company said at the time. “The investment is part of Square’s ongoing commitment to bitcoin.”