9 ms·

Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

233 points by benchtobedside 4y ago

Overtonwindow 4y ago
A drug company pulls advertising? This kind of feels like a win.
- danudey 4y ago
  This stunt embarrassed a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, cost a lot of people a lot of money, and drew even more attention to a controversy, while also eroding huge amounts of what little trust Twitter had left from both users and corporations (whether they advertise or not), and also focused all of this negative attention directly on the world's richest man and made it look like he's just a sad little boy begging for attention and validation from the masses. All that and zero downsides? That's a huge win in my book.
throwaway14356 4y ago
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 24/7 no need for money.
tibbydudeza 4y ago
So Elon fired the engineer who told him that thousands of RPC calls for timeline is BS. What a glorious shit show.
ro_bit 4y ago
> It’s not worth the risk when patient trust and health are on the line. Ah yes, the patient's trust in the company to rip them off on lifesaving drugs
- dragontamer 4y ago
  Patients seem to trust that Eli Lilly's drugs work. The price point may not be trusted, but its efficacy is trusted.
  - mirzap 4y ago
    Patients don't have real choice. Options are either you die or spend hundreds* of dollars on a drug that everywhere else on the planet costs few bucks.
    - spywaregorilla 4y ago
      That doesn't contradict the point above
    - Spivak 4y ago
      Patients seldom have a choice in any aspect of their care. We could flood the market with dirt cheap insulin using an older formulation but surprise you can’t actually do that without one of the oligarchs buying your company just to stop you.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Or the dirt cheap insulin does not work as well as the newer patented insulin that a private company paid to do R&D for. There is nothing stopping Congress from passing a bill to fund insulin R&D that provides the newest insulin technology without being patented, but the fact that they do not and would rather sit in their pulpit and “grill” private company representatives proves that it is all a show. We (sufficient voters) want to pay for nothing, but expect everything.
searchableguy 4y ago
I wonder if Elon also thought of this when he made verification checks paid. 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.
- ctvo 4y ago
  > 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. I don't think we can assume he must have been aware of anything. That team was told to release it by November 9th or they were all fired or some such, right? so in a week and a half, release this new feature.
- x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
  I would think any verified account worth buying on the grey market would be worth more than $8.
- Krasnol 4y ago
  He doesn't look like he thought much. At all. But maybe that's some genius plan with a spectacular outcome that I fail to see.
scotty79 4y ago
It's super funny that identity verification of authors of things published was basically more than half of the value twitter provided to its users, both readers and writers and the first thing Elon did was to destroy it. Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing. 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't a user of stackoverflow and didn'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. 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's world famous billionaire) so he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted. It'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.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > 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's world famous billionaire) so he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted. And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively. For instance, in this case they should have at least added ID verification (of the kind Facebook sometimes forces people to do), and only allowed people to verify their real names for $8. It seems like Musk also got too used to people cutting him slack for his crap at Tesla and SpaceX, but those companies have mission narratives that people can "believe in." That's not the case for Twitter, and it's looking like Musk is going to slam into the ground without that net to catch him. It also doesn't help that there's a Twitter replacement (Mastodon) waiting in the wings. IIRC, Bad decisions like Musk's killed Digg, because Reddit was there to take the exodus.
  - ryandvm 4y ago
falcolas 4y ago
Aah, yes, the company who lost billions in "value". And yet their stock is already back up 60% of the amount it dropped in a mere 3 days. I have to imagine they're doing this for the continued exposure. There's no such thing as bad press and all that.
- Spivak 4y ago
  I mean I doubt it, I think it’s more that not having a Twitter presence at all is better for everyone who isn’t joining in the fun of bullying Elon.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  > And yet their stock is already back up 60% of the amount it dropped in a mere 3 days. Alternatively phrased as after 3 days, only a mere 40% has been lost. Hits different though.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    That's the key word: lost. Nothing's been lost - neither Eli Lilly nor their shareholders have lost any money (unless they sold their stock, at which point they aren't shareholders). The price of their stock dipped, and is rising back up. At worst, Eli Lilly would have had slightly higher interest rates on their next round of debt funding.
    - malfist 4y ago
      Stock prices don't move unless people are selling. So shareholders absolutely lost money.
      - throwuwu 4y ago
        The people selling based off of tweetstorms or breaking news are not mom and pop investors saving for retirement. They’re day traders trying to squeeze profit out of fluctuations.
legitster 4y ago
Is the fake accounts thing overblown? 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.
- skyyler 4y ago
  Isn't the move to have an established account with a couple thousand followers, then change profile pic and name and then do the $8 verify? I don't use twitter so I'm just assuming how this works.
  - gruez 4y ago
    Wouldn't the username look off? eg. if you set up with an account with something like "@cutecatpics" as the username to get followers, wouldn't it look suspicious even if changed the name to "Eli Lilly"? It will look like Eli Lilly @cutecatpics You can try flipping this (legit looking username to start with), but it'll look suspicious when you're trying to rack up followers Cute cat pics @eli_lilly_official
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      Eli Lilly's official twitter handle was @LillyPad. The fake was @EliLillyandCo. The part about followers doesn't matter because the number of followers someone has doesn't show up in the feed, nor is it emphasized that boldly. Someone can just make a fake account, write a fake tweet, and the retweet that tweet onto their actual account.
      - iudqnolq 4y ago
        It's also completely plausible for a real, situationally important authority to have very few followers.
    - drcongo 4y ago
      You can change your handle on Twitter.
labrador 4y ago
My theory is that when people who lean right are complaining about a "woke agenda" at Twitter they are complaining mostly about trans activism. Since Eli Lilly is trans friendly, I wouldn't be sure that Musk is unhappy they are leaving his platform. Corporate Equality Index: List of Businesses with Transgender-Inclusive Health Insurance Benefits https://www.thehrcfoundation.org/professional-resources/corporate-equality-index-list-of-businesses-with-transgender-inclusive-health-insurance-benefits https://www.thehrcfoundation.org/professional-resources/corp... 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 https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/10/10/elon-musk-says-he-lost-transgender-daughter-because-of-neo-marxists/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/10/10/elon-musk-says-he-los...
- watwut 4y ago
  They are complaining about two things: - If you tweet n-word enough, you get banned. Same with too much calls for violence. But, the line is actually pretty low. - Getting only little algorithmic advantage over liberals rather then a lot of ot. The hate toward existing employees is kinda leaking from Musks feed. Not sure what that one is about, but I am sure they did not made his kid go no contact nor made his wife's divorce.
- erite 4y ago
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  > My theory is that when people who lean right are complaining about a "woke agenda" at Twitter they are complaining mostly about trans activism. Twitter shouldn't ban people on behalf of a corporation; it has nothing to do with "woke" or not "woke". This is a problem with all media, advertising groups have formed mobs that intimidate organizations like Twitter, and other media outlets that don't give in to their corporate agenda. It might sound great that your agenda and the corporations agenda are aligned at this moment in time, but I assure you they are fair-weather friends. They wouldn't skip a beat stomping all over the LGBTQ+ agenda if it was profitable for them. A world where groups of corporations control free speech through collective intimidation is literally a dystopian science fiction trope. So IMHO, it doesn't matter where you lean politically, screw Eli Lilly and others like them.
jahlove 4y ago
that's the ugliest URL i've seen on HN.
- klyrs 4y ago
  it's unnecessary too: https://endpts.com/aa/GNCCE127YE96J7TZ/ https://endpts.com/aa/GNCCE127YE96J7TZ/
- benchtobedside 4y ago
  The submitted link was: https://e.endpointsnews.com/t/t-l-auriiuk-cjrhukllr-k/ https://e.endpointsnews.com/t/t-l-auriiuk-cjrhukllr-k/ - this was an email newsletter link used to allow readers to bypass Endpoints' paywall. HN then modified it to its current ugly form.
abeppu 4y ago
> 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. 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's a dumpster fire makes sense. "Voting with your dollars" to show Twitter that their fumbles matter and they must do better can make sense. But I don't see how this drawdown would do anything to improve "patient trust and health."
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  Yes it is. It puts pressure on Twitter to handle these situations better and/or reduces expectations that Eli Lilly or more companies broadly, if this spreads, will be posting official information on Twitter going forward.
Robotbeat 4y ago
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? 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/or acting in a damaging way. 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/fined. Exactly like vandalism. (And there’s maybe an ethical case to be made for direct action/civil disobedience, but legally that’s not a valid excuse so there’s definitely risk of being sued and/or arrested.)
- dariusj18 4y ago
  Not difficult to claim parody protection
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    Its just a prank bro - or I am a "Journalist"
- munificent 4y ago
  When you get enough people together, it's not enough to rely on the disincentive of individual prosecution to avoid bad actors. At scale, someone will think it's worth the risk or just not think at all and do something harmful. This is why you can't open a bar without bouncers, or have an outdoor concert without on premise security. When you concentrate people together you simultaneously: 1. Increase the number of times you roll the dice with someone choosing to be harmful. 2. Increase the number of people within the blast radius (figurative or sometimes literal) of the bad actor who does. You simply can't escape this fundamental law of human behavior. If you're building a system that aggregates people together—physically or virtually—you have an obligation to understand and deal with this.
- GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
  Honestly, that's more on Twitter than anyone who is doing the impersonating, whether parody or not. Their design and brand language put the "blue checkmark" front and center as a badge of legitimacy, giving it away for $8 to anyone is just asking for fraud. Alternatively: this sort of thing will always happen because it has the potentially to be very funny
yawnxyz 4y ago
How much of this "fake tweet causes a billion dollar drop in market cap" is coincidental? Everyone talks about it like the tweet CAUSED it, but did it really? Especially when the market is already so choppy?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- giarc 4y ago
  There must be an ETF focused on pharmaceuticals. How did it compare to Eli Lilly over the same time period? https://etfdb.com/etfs/industry/pharmaceutical/ https://etfdb.com/etfs/industry/pharmaceutical/
- dottrap 4y ago
  Something smells fishy if you look into this. - If you look at after hours trading, nothing really happened. In fact, the stock actually had a strong up bar for a little bit. - Also, since Eli Lilly posted an official tweet stating the news was fake within 3 hours, again we should have seen something in after hours trading, but there is nothing there. This is a huge amount of lead time before market open of the next day. - A bunch of other companies all crashed at market open at the same time as Eli Lilly. Maybe you could argue that Eli Lilly fake news crashed all the pharmaceutical stocks, but CVS and Cigna which are healthcare, not pharma also crashed. Cigna lost over 10% compared to Eli's 6%. It doesn't add up that fake news on pharma Eli would punish healthcare Cigna even more.
petilon 4y ago
My guess is Elon Musk will sell Twitter at a loss within a year.
- consumer451 4y ago
  I wonder what the company is worth on the open market, say at this moment.
  - century19 4y ago
    And sell it to who? It's going to have to be seriously discounted because it will cost them years to rebuild what he has already broken.
    - blitzar 4y ago
      China, Russia, Saudi-Arabia would be first ports of call on my roadshow.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      I'm sure there's a SPAC out there that might want it. And thus the cycle will be complete.
      - century19 4y ago
        I'm sure you could find a buyer, but the price would be on their terms.
  - plushpuffin 4y ago
    Somebody on Twitter estimated that based on how much banks are trying to resell their loans for, it’s worth about $8 billion right now. Disclaimer: I have no idea what this guy is talking about. https://twitter.com/bamabonds/status/1590801975339540480 https://twitter.com/bamabonds/status/1590801975339540480
- IAmGraydon 4y ago
  There will be nothing left to sell. If the destruction of Twitter is not intentional, Elon is truly among the most incompetent business owners I can think of.
mgraczyk 4y ago
Seems pretty unlikely that this fake tweet affected the company's stock. It's odd this reporting has survived. 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'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's creation or growth in impressions.
throwuwu 4y ago
> However, the real damage had already been done. By Friday morning, Lilly stock had dropped by more than 5% from the day before. 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.
- idunno246 4y ago
  but this is how all stock reporting works, and its pretty useless. they look at every big move, find some weak correlation, and pump out an article. and then if it generates enough clicks the regular newsrooms copy it. ive even seen 'why XX is losing big', and 'why XX is going up' on the same day from the same publisher. basically no stock news is reliable, it all might as well be AI written
- kmlx 4y ago
  from the same article: > By Friday morning, Lilly stock had dropped by more than 5% from the day before. The Twitter stunt pulled down the stock price of other diabetes drugmakers, including Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. Lilly’s stock has yet to recover and, on Monday morning, remained down more than 4% over the past five days. the funniest part is when you actually follow that stock, you know why it's down, but then you read someone's twitter and they think the stock's down due some campaign or tweet :)
  - dorkwood 4y ago
    I don't follow the stock. What's the real reason it's down?
    - fragmede 4y ago
      > Eli Lilly is down 5% because the market for their most profitable drug, a $125k/yr mAb IL-17 inhibitor, fell 5%. This is why Novartis, their major competitor with Cosentyx, is also down the same amount > Not everything is about Twitter! https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1591149510168039426 https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1591149510168039426
elijaht 4y ago
I actually liked the ~idea~ behind this but not the execution, which I can't believe was so bungled In my ideal world, Twitter Blue would act as "identity verification as a service". Pay $X/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 "I am John Smith", but also could be "I am CorpA" or "I am <Internet Identity>" 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. What about profile name changes? That's why it's a monthly payment. Allow Y changes per month still subject to the same verification process 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's license or recent bill and you are probably okay. For more notable people/corps, you will need to provide higher documentation but at the same time, that's a much smaller # of accounts (and currently done today)
- giarc 4y ago
  I thought it would use a service similar to this from Canada Post [1]. Obviously would only work for Canada, but I'm sure many other countries have a similar service. People will balk at the in-person side of things, but it would create a safer service if your real identify was verified. For users, not wanting to use their real name, perhaps they could opt into a low tier service with a different badge. I know there are many online services providing a similar service, not sure how secure they are, but obviously another option. 1 - https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/business/postal-services/digital-proof-identity.page https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/business/posta...
  - redanddead 4y ago
    Woah what is this thing? I've never been prompted to use it though, have you? in which context?
    - bpye 4y ago
      I know (from experience) that HireRight use it for background checks.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
It seems to me that "being verified" means you shouldn't get to change your Twitter display name without undergoing another review process. I don't think the whole idea of charging for verification is now a discredited idea because of these past events.
- fragmede 4y ago
  The idea is fine, the issue is that verification is a hard problem to solve properly in an automated fashion and with actual money on the line, you can be sure there will be motivated attackers, trying to abuse the system. So you hire a small army of human contractors to do manual verification on top of automated systems. Except someone went and fired 80% of that team over the weekend.
BrainVirus 4y ago
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  I'm not sure anyone would believe this when the other narrative is simply more fun. If we're going to frame events using narration we have to be cognizant that spectacle wins. A fun story is going to trump a boring one every time. It's Memetics 101.
- gardenhedge 4y ago
  Agree. Everything I've read (mostly from Reddit) about Twitter and Musk has been silly.
- weakfish 4y ago
  Ad hominem @ supposed former twitter engineers, nice one
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - deleted 4y ago
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- nativespecies 4y ago
hn2017 4y ago
People in this thread know nothing about brand value. smh. Musk is just as clueless
pyrale 4y ago
I've never seen a kid break a toy that fast.
yalogin 4y ago
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.
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
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…

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

danudey 4y ago
This stunt embarrassed a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, cost a lot of people a lot of money, and drew even more attention to a controversy, while also eroding huge amounts of what little trust Twitter had left from both users and corporations (whether they advertise or not), and also focused all of this negative attention directly on the world's richest man and made it look like he's just a sad little boy begging for attention and validation from the masses. All that and zero downsides? That's a huge win in my book.

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 24/7 no need for money.

tibbydudeza 4y ago

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

ro_bit 4y ago

> It’s not worth the risk when patient trust and health are on the line. Ah yes, the patient's trust in the company to rip them off on lifesaving drugs

dragontamer 4y ago
Patients seem to trust that Eli Lilly's drugs work. The price point may not be trusted, but its efficacy is trusted.
- mirzap 4y ago
  Patients don't have real choice. Options are either you die or spend hundreds* of dollars on a drug that everywhere else on the planet costs few bucks.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    That doesn't contradict the point above
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Patients seldom have a choice in any aspect of their care. We could flood the market with dirt cheap insulin using an older formulation but surprise you can’t actually do that without one of the oligarchs buying your company just to stop you.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Or the dirt cheap insulin does not work as well as the newer patented insulin that a private company paid to do R&D for. There is nothing stopping Congress from passing a bill to fund insulin R&D that provides the newest insulin technology without being patented, but the fact that they do not and would rather sit in their pulpit and “grill” private company representatives proves that it is all a show. We (sufficient voters) want to pay for nothing, but expect everything.

searchableguy 4y ago

I wonder if Elon also thought of this when he made verification checks paid. 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.

ctvo 4y ago
> 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. I don't think we can assume he must have been aware of anything. That team was told to release it by November 9th or they were all fired or some such, right? so in a week and a half, release this new feature.
x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
I would think any verified account worth buying on the grey market would be worth more than $8.
Krasnol 4y ago
He doesn't look like he thought much. At all. But maybe that's some genius plan with a spectacular outcome that I fail to see.

scotty79 4y ago

It'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. Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing. 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't a user of stackoverflow and didn'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. 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's world famous billionaire) so he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted. It'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.

tablespoon 4y ago
> 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's world famous billionaire) so he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted. And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively. For instance, in this case they should have at least added ID verification (of the kind Facebook sometimes forces people to do), and only allowed people to verify their real names for $8. It seems like Musk also got too used to people cutting him slack for his crap at Tesla and SpaceX, but those companies have mission narratives that people can "believe in." That's not the case for Twitter, and it's looking like Musk is going to slam into the ground without that net to catch him. It also doesn't help that there's a Twitter replacement (Mastodon) waiting in the wings. IIRC, Bad decisions like Musk's killed Digg, because Reddit was there to take the exodus.
- ryandvm 4y ago

falcolas 4y ago

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

Spivak 4y ago
I mean I doubt it, I think it’s more that not having a Twitter presence at all is better for everyone who isn’t joining in the fun of bullying Elon.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
> And yet their stock is already back up 60% of the amount it dropped in a mere 3 days. Alternatively phrased as after 3 days, only a mere 40% has been lost. Hits different though.
- falcolas 4y ago
  That's the key word: lost. Nothing's been lost - neither Eli Lilly nor their shareholders have lost any money (unless they sold their stock, at which point they aren't shareholders). The price of their stock dipped, and is rising back up. At worst, Eli Lilly would have had slightly higher interest rates on their next round of debt funding.
  - malfist 4y ago
    Stock prices don't move unless people are selling. So shareholders absolutely lost money.
    - throwuwu 4y ago
      The people selling based off of tweetstorms or breaking news are not mom and pop investors saving for retirement. They’re day traders trying to squeeze profit out of fluctuations.

legitster 4y ago

Is the fake accounts thing overblown? 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.

skyyler 4y ago
Isn't the move to have an established account with a couple thousand followers, then change profile pic and name and then do the $8 verify? I don't use twitter so I'm just assuming how this works.
- gruez 4y ago
  Wouldn't the username look off? eg. if you set up with an account with something like "@cutecatpics" as the username to get followers, wouldn't it look suspicious even if changed the name to "Eli Lilly"? It will look like Eli Lilly @cutecatpics You can try flipping this (legit looking username to start with), but it'll look suspicious when you're trying to rack up followers Cute cat pics @eli_lilly_official
  - nemothekid 4y ago
    Eli Lilly's official twitter handle was @LillyPad. The fake was @EliLillyandCo. The part about followers doesn't matter because the number of followers someone has doesn't show up in the feed, nor is it emphasized that boldly. Someone can just make a fake account, write a fake tweet, and the retweet that tweet onto their actual account.
    - iudqnolq 4y ago
      It's also completely plausible for a real, situationally important authority to have very few followers.
  - drcongo 4y ago
    You can change your handle on Twitter.

labrador 4y ago

My theory is that when people who lean right are complaining about a "woke agenda" at Twitter they are complaining mostly about trans activism. Since Eli Lilly is trans friendly, I wouldn't be sure that Musk is unhappy they are leaving his platform. Corporate Equality Index: List of Businesses with Transgender-Inclusive Health Insurance Benefits https://www.thehrcfoundation.org/professional-resources/corporate-equality-index-list-of-businesses-with-transgender-inclusive-health-insurance-benefits https://www.thehrcfoundation.org/professional-resources/corp... 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 https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/10/10/elon-musk-says-he-lost-transgender-daughter-because-of-neo-marxists/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/10/10/elon-musk-says-he-los...

watwut 4y ago
They are complaining about two things: - If you tweet n-word enough, you get banned. Same with too much calls for violence. But, the line is actually pretty low. - Getting only little algorithmic advantage over liberals rather then a lot of ot. The hate toward existing employees is kinda leaking from Musks feed. Not sure what that one is about, but I am sure they did not made his kid go no contact nor made his wife's divorce.
erite 4y ago
oceanplexian 4y ago
> My theory is that when people who lean right are complaining about a "woke agenda" at Twitter they are complaining mostly about trans activism. Twitter shouldn't ban people on behalf of a corporation; it has nothing to do with "woke" or not "woke". This is a problem with all media, advertising groups have formed mobs that intimidate organizations like Twitter, and other media outlets that don't give in to their corporate agenda. It might sound great that your agenda and the corporations agenda are aligned at this moment in time, but I assure you they are fair-weather friends. They wouldn't skip a beat stomping all over the LGBTQ+ agenda if it was profitable for them. A world where groups of corporations control free speech through collective intimidation is literally a dystopian science fiction trope. So IMHO, it doesn't matter where you lean politically, screw Eli Lilly and others like them.

jahlove 4y ago

that's the ugliest URL i've seen on HN.

klyrs 4y ago
it's unnecessary too: https://endpts.com/aa/GNCCE127YE96J7TZ/ https://endpts.com/aa/GNCCE127YE96J7TZ/
benchtobedside 4y ago
The submitted link was: https://e.endpointsnews.com/t/t-l-auriiuk-cjrhukllr-k/ https://e.endpointsnews.com/t/t-l-auriiuk-cjrhukllr-k/ - this was an email newsletter link used to allow readers to bypass Endpoints' paywall. HN then modified it to its current ugly form.

abeppu 4y ago

> 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. 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's a dumpster fire makes sense. "Voting with your dollars" to show Twitter that their fumbles matter and they must do better can make sense. But I don't see how this drawdown would do anything to improve "patient trust and health."

rhaway84773 4y ago
Yes it is. It puts pressure on Twitter to handle these situations better and/or reduces expectations that Eli Lilly or more companies broadly, if this spreads, will be posting official information on Twitter going forward.

Robotbeat 4y ago

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? 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/or acting in a damaging way. 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/fined. Exactly like vandalism. (And there’s maybe an ethical case to be made for direct action/civil disobedience, but legally that’s not a valid excuse so there’s definitely risk of being sued and/or arrested.)

dariusj18 4y ago
Not difficult to claim parody protection
- shapefrog 4y ago
  Its just a prank bro - or I am a "Journalist"
munificent 4y ago
When you get enough people together, it's not enough to rely on the disincentive of individual prosecution to avoid bad actors. At scale, someone will think it's worth the risk or just not think at all and do something harmful. This is why you can't open a bar without bouncers, or have an outdoor concert without on premise security. When you concentrate people together you simultaneously: 1. Increase the number of times you roll the dice with someone choosing to be harmful. 2. Increase the number of people within the blast radius (figurative or sometimes literal) of the bad actor who does. You simply can't escape this fundamental law of human behavior. If you're building a system that aggregates people together—physically or virtually—you have an obligation to understand and deal with this.
GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
Honestly, that's more on Twitter than anyone who is doing the impersonating, whether parody or not. Their design and brand language put the "blue checkmark" front and center as a badge of legitimacy, giving it away for $8 to anyone is just asking for fraud. Alternatively: this sort of thing will always happen because it has the potentially to be very funny

yawnxyz 4y ago

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

deleted 4y ago
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giarc 4y ago
There must be an ETF focused on pharmaceuticals. How did it compare to Eli Lilly over the same time period? https://etfdb.com/etfs/industry/pharmaceutical/ https://etfdb.com/etfs/industry/pharmaceutical/
dottrap 4y ago
Something smells fishy if you look into this. - If you look at after hours trading, nothing really happened. In fact, the stock actually had a strong up bar for a little bit. - Also, since Eli Lilly posted an official tweet stating the news was fake within 3 hours, again we should have seen something in after hours trading, but there is nothing there. This is a huge amount of lead time before market open of the next day. - A bunch of other companies all crashed at market open at the same time as Eli Lilly. Maybe you could argue that Eli Lilly fake news crashed all the pharmaceutical stocks, but CVS and Cigna which are healthcare, not pharma also crashed. Cigna lost over 10% compared to Eli's 6%. It doesn't add up that fake news on pharma Eli would punish healthcare Cigna even more.

petilon 4y ago

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

consumer451 4y ago
I wonder what the company is worth on the open market, say at this moment.
- century19 4y ago
  And sell it to who? It's going to have to be seriously discounted because it will cost them years to rebuild what he has already broken.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    China, Russia, Saudi-Arabia would be first ports of call on my roadshow.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    I'm sure there's a SPAC out there that might want it. And thus the cycle will be complete.
    - century19 4y ago
      I'm sure you could find a buyer, but the price would be on their terms.
- plushpuffin 4y ago
  Somebody on Twitter estimated that based on how much banks are trying to resell their loans for, it’s worth about $8 billion right now. Disclaimer: I have no idea what this guy is talking about. https://twitter.com/bamabonds/status/1590801975339540480 https://twitter.com/bamabonds/status/1590801975339540480
IAmGraydon 4y ago
There will be nothing left to sell. If the destruction of Twitter is not intentional, Elon is truly among the most incompetent business owners I can think of.

mgraczyk 4y ago

Seems pretty unlikely that this fake tweet affected the company's stock. It's odd this reporting has survived. 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'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's creation or growth in impressions.

throwuwu 4y ago

> However, the real damage had already been done. By Friday morning, Lilly stock had dropped by more than 5% from the day before. 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.

idunno246 4y ago
but this is how all stock reporting works, and its pretty useless. they look at every big move, find some weak correlation, and pump out an article. and then if it generates enough clicks the regular newsrooms copy it. ive even seen 'why XX is losing big', and 'why XX is going up' on the same day from the same publisher. basically no stock news is reliable, it all might as well be AI written
kmlx 4y ago
from the same article: > By Friday morning, Lilly stock had dropped by more than 5% from the day before. The Twitter stunt pulled down the stock price of other diabetes drugmakers, including Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. Lilly’s stock has yet to recover and, on Monday morning, remained down more than 4% over the past five days. the funniest part is when you actually follow that stock, you know why it's down, but then you read someone's twitter and they think the stock's down due some campaign or tweet :)
- dorkwood 4y ago
  I don't follow the stock. What's the real reason it's down?
  - fragmede 4y ago
    > Eli Lilly is down 5% because the market for their most profitable drug, a $125k/yr mAb IL-17 inhibitor, fell 5%. This is why Novartis, their major competitor with Cosentyx, is also down the same amount > Not everything is about Twitter! https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1591149510168039426 https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1591149510168039426

elijaht 4y ago

I actually liked the ~idea~ behind this but not the execution, which I can't believe was so bungled In my ideal world, Twitter Blue would act as "identity verification as a service". Pay $X/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 "I am John Smith", but also could be "I am CorpA" or "I am <Internet Identity>" 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. What about profile name changes? That's why it's a monthly payment. Allow Y changes per month still subject to the same verification process 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's license or recent bill and you are probably okay. For more notable people/corps, you will need to provide higher documentation but at the same time, that's a much smaller # of accounts (and currently done today)

giarc 4y ago
I thought it would use a service similar to this from Canada Post [1]. Obviously would only work for Canada, but I'm sure many other countries have a similar service. People will balk at the in-person side of things, but it would create a safer service if your real identify was verified. For users, not wanting to use their real name, perhaps they could opt into a low tier service with a different badge. I know there are many online services providing a similar service, not sure how secure they are, but obviously another option. 1 - https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/business/postal-services/digital-proof-identity.page https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/business/posta...
- redanddead 4y ago
  Woah what is this thing? I've never been prompted to use it though, have you? in which context?
  - bpye 4y ago
    I know (from experience) that HireRight use it for background checks.

BitwiseFool 4y ago

It seems to me that "being verified" means you shouldn't get to change your Twitter display name without undergoing another review process. I don't think the whole idea of charging for verification is now a discredited idea because of these past events.

fragmede 4y ago
The idea is fine, the issue is that verification is a hard problem to solve properly in an automated fashion and with actual money on the line, you can be sure there will be motivated attackers, trying to abuse the system. So you hire a small army of human contractors to do manual verification on top of automated systems. Except someone went and fired 80% of that team over the weekend.

BrainVirus 4y ago

kelseyfrog 4y ago
I'm not sure anyone would believe this when the other narrative is simply more fun. If we're going to frame events using narration we have to be cognizant that spectacle wins. A fun story is going to trump a boring one every time. It's Memetics 101.
gardenhedge 4y ago
Agree. Everything I've read (mostly from Reddit) about Twitter and Musk has been silly.
weakfish 4y ago
Ad hominem @ supposed former twitter engineers, nice one
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nativespecies 4y ago

hn2017 4y ago

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

pyrale 4y ago

I've never seen a kid break a toy that fast.

yalogin 4y ago

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.

isitmadeofglass 4y ago

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…