Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

It&#x27;s super funny that identity verification of authors of things published was basically more than half of the value twitter provided to its users, both readers and writers and the first thing Elon did was to destroy it.<p>Just to replace it with what he calls &quot;payment verified&quot;, which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing.<p>It kind of reminds me how a while back somebody posted proposed redesign of stackoverflow to make it more nice from UX perspective. However this person wasn&#x27;t a user of stackoverflow and didn&#x27;t understand how much value which features provide and suggested changes that would make very valuable features removed or made less easily accessible while bringing to the front features that are not very useful.<p>I think it just helps to be a user of the product and have a deep understanding for it before you make any changes. Elon used twitter a lot, but in pretty unusual fashion (because he&#x27;s world famous billionaire) so he really didn&#x27;t understand what&#x27;s most valuable part and took it for granted.<p>It&#x27;s really a bit surprising that noone told him that his tweets are worth anything only because people reading them can know they come from Elon not some guy who paid 8$ to call himself Elon on Twitter.

I actually liked the ~idea~ behind this but not the execution, which I can&#x27;t believe was so bungled<p>In my ideal world, Twitter Blue would act as &quot;identity verification as a service&quot;. Pay $X&#x2F;month and provide some proof of identity linked to your display name on Twitter. If the two correlate, you get the check. I think identity could be fairly flexible- could be &quot;I am John Smith&quot;, but also could be &quot;I am CorpA&quot; or &quot;I am &lt;Internet Identity&gt;&quot;<p>Verified accounts could then get priority display of tweets or replies. This cuts down on spam severely as now the barrier to getting high visibility tweets is $$$ AND verification.<p>What about profile name changes? That&#x27;s why it&#x27;s a monthly payment. Allow Y changes per month still subject to the same verification process<p>What is the cost of doing so? I feel (maybe naively), fairly small. I think verifying I am John Smith is super easy for non-notable people (no one is trying to impersonate you)- send a driver&#x27;s license or recent bill and you are probably okay. For more notable people&#x2F;corps, you will need to provide higher documentation but at the same time, that&#x27;s a much smaller # of accounts (and currently done today)

&gt; However, the real damage had already been done. By Friday morning, Lilly stock had dropped by more than 5% from the day before.<p>Bad reporting right here. If you look at their stock chart this is far from an unusual movement. In just the last six months they’ve had several drops of 5% and at least one 10% drop. This is more than just bending the meaning of “damage”, long term investors won’t even notice and day traders will see this as the opportunity it is.

Are people aware that impersonating a company’s customer is, like, fraud and opens them up to being sued for damages when something like this happens?<p>There are kind of two things that happened, here. One is a kind of rushed implementation of a questionable feature. The other is a breakdown of social taboo of just violating the law and&#x2F;or acting in a damaging way.<p>We all know that spam and bots are rampant on the Internet. But people providing their valid credit card numbers to then impersonate another company for trolling purposes is something that could happen in lots of cases but held in check by people knowing they’d be sued or arrested&#x2F;fined. Exactly like vandalism.<p>(And there’s maybe an ethical case to be made for direct action&#x2F;civil disobedience, but legally that’s not a valid excuse so there’s definitely risk of being sued and&#x2F;or arrested.)

&gt; It’s not worth the risk when patient trust and health are on the line.<p>Ah yes, the patient&#x27;s trust in the company to rip them off on lifesaving drugs

Aah, yes, the company who lost billions in &quot;value&quot;. And yet their stock is already back up 60% of the amount it dropped in a mere 3 days.<p>I have to imagine they&#x27;re doing this for the continued exposure. There&#x27;s no such thing as bad press and all that.

I wonder if Elon also thought of this when he made verification checks paid.<p>He must have been aware of verified accounts getting sold and used for scamming so maybe he wanted to dip into that instead of losing it to middleman.

Is the fake accounts thing overblown?<p>Like, if I create a fake verified Eli Lilly account on Twitter with no followers, how would anyone even see it? It seems like it would only get picked up and shared by people in on the joke.

How much of this &quot;fake tweet causes a billion dollar drop in market cap&quot; is coincidental? Everyone talks about it like the tweet CAUSED it, but did it really? Especially when the market is already so choppy?

Seems pretty unlikely that this fake tweet affected the company&#x27;s stock. It&#x27;s odd this reporting has survived.<p>Other similar companies that are not in the Insulin business in any way moved down by about the same amount at the same time. Eli Lilly&#x27;s stock has mostly gone back up. Also the timing is off, the stock moved after open the following day, after other news was announced and not in line with the timing of the tweet&#x27;s creation or growth in impressions.

My theory is that when people who lean right are complaining about a &quot;woke agenda&quot; at Twitter they are complaining mostly about trans activism. Since Eli Lilly is trans friendly, I wouldn&#x27;t be sure that Musk is unhappy they are leaving his platform.<p>Corporate Equality Index: List of Businesses with Transgender-Inclusive Health Insurance Benefits<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thehrcfoundation.org&#x2F;professional-resources&#x2F;corporate-equality-index-list-of-businesses-with-transgender-inclusive-health-insurance-benefits" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thehrcfoundation.org&#x2F;professional-resources&#x2F;corp...</a><p>Elon Musk says he lost transgender daughter because of ‘neo-Marxists’ As the Tesla CEO explained in a new interview, he apparently sees no link between his controversial statements about gender identity issues and his daughter’s move to legally sever ties with him<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mercurynews.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;elon-musk-says-he-lost-transgender-daughter-because-of-neo-marxists&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mercurynews.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;elon-musk-says-he-los...</a>

I&#x27;ve never seen a kid break a toy that fast.

A drug company pulls advertising? This kind of feels like a win.

So I guess Elon ends up winning by instantly showing how much damage he can wreck against big organizations if they don’t pay him huge sums to “advertise” essentially internet anarchy protection money. And I’m sure how bigger companies are paying up they’ll do actual verification before anyone else gets to go out with a blue checkmark claiming to be Eli Lilly…

So Elon fired the engineer who told him that thousands of RPC calls for timeline is BS.<p>What a glorious shit show.

How much of what that article says is true? I understand that Elon is destroying twitter but it was reported that the drop in the Eli Lily stock was because they lost some patent litigation and not the fake tweet. I don’t know what to believe now.

that&#x27;s the ugliest URL i&#x27;ve seen on HN.

My theory is to run it into the ground for laughs. He didnt want the conpany but then had to buy it. Costs a bit of money but its just money? The guy only wants to work 24&#x2F;7 no need for money.

&gt; What’s the benefit to a company … of staying on Twitter? It’s not worth the risk when patient trust and health are on the line.<p>This reasoning seems broken to me; the ability of a fake account to make a bogus announcement is not reduced by Eli Lilly withdrawing their ad spend. Pulling out of advertising on twitter because it&#x27;s a dumpster fire makes sense. &quot;Voting with your dollars&quot; to show Twitter that their fumbles matter and they must do better can make sense. But I don&#x27;t see how this drawdown would do anything to improve &quot;patient trust and health.&quot;

My guess is Elon Musk will sell Twitter at a loss within a year.

People in this thread know nothing about brand value. smh. Musk is just as clueless

It seems to me that &quot;being verified&quot; means you shouldn&#x27;t get to change your Twitter display name without undergoing another review process. I don&#x27;t think the whole idea of charging for verification is now a discredited idea because of these past events.