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.
> 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 $8.
It seems like Musk also got too used to people cutting him slack for his crap at Tesla and SpaceX, but those companies have mission narratives that people can "believe in." That's not the case for Twitter, and it's looking like Musk is going to slam into the ground without that net to catch him.
It also doesn't help that there's a Twitter replacement (Mastodon) waiting in the wings. IIRC, Bad decisions like Musk's killed Digg, because Reddit was there to take the exodus.
> Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing.
1. Create a new Apple account
2. Buy a $10 iTunes gift card
3. Use that to pay for Twitter Blue
Would I pay $10 and twenty minutes of my time to knock $20bn off of an insulin profiteer's stock price? Absolutely. Put me down for a recurring subscription.
Unverified accounts provide most of the good content on Twitter, so I think you're wrong there. What should have happened is you do have an $8 (I think $8 is too much, but alas) verification, but you simply make the badge different. Some people say that defeats the purpose, but it doesn't. You then know you are talking to someone with a vested interest, and since credit cards are now linked to the account you can do more high value advertising to those customers. You also get the ability to edit, have slightly less ads, etc. It's such a simple solution. I don't know why Elon is being stubborn about it being the exact same, or why people are totally against the idea of new verification methods.
Getting verified previously with a small account was cumbersome and took ages.
In general I'm a fan of Elon, not his crazy political stuff, but just the cool businesses he does.
But this twitter thing beginning to end has mostly been a disaster. I think he's mostly unfairly hated, in that almost any CEO is as bad or worse but he's his own worst enemy with twitter.
He's alienated a lot of people and then alienates them more by saying people should boycott thier products.
> 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.
To be completely fair, this is my feeling about the web Twitter and especially Reddit UI.
It’s much worse than that. Selling the verification check mark to anyone with $8 poisoned the platform instantaneously.
It’s a bit like the DMV suddenly starting to sell driver licenses without any proof that you are who you say you are. Immediate erasure of the trustworthiness of any driver’s license, forever.
I cannot imagine that Musk was not aware or made aware of this consequence. He did it anyway.
The only thing they had to do was have someone's nephew draw a different symbol for the $8 tier and use that instead of the very well known Verified badge.
That's it. This whole debacle would've been instantly avoided.
If you asked Elon (atleast before he stepped into Twitter HQ) I'm sure he'd disagree with you, and he'd claim good ideas can come from anywhere and it shouldn't matter who they are or if they are important.
You can have a fake ID.
I would calculate that "payment verified" is way cheaper than full identity verification. But it's easier to create several iClouds with the same cc, so you still need to check IDs, but you can compare newly created accounts (or ones that changed their name) with existing accounts and check for similarities and flag those accounts. The thing is that you can automate that and you need to do that only for a small percent of subscribed users.
Instead of fully checking everyone's identity you check only flagged accounts.
> It's really a bit surprising that noone told him that his tweets are worth anything only because people reading them can know they come from Elon not some guy who paid 8$ to call himself Elon on Twitter.
I'm aware of no less than 3 formerly verified individuals who did tell him[1] before the feature launched, and he responded by banning them for impersonating him and instituting a "no lying about who you are" rule that empirically works on an honor system, or upon pain of forfeiting $8.
1. "Showed him" would be more accurate, but he shockingly failed to grasp the point they were making.
They should have done actual verification like many financial accounts do (you upload your ID and answer questions on your past). Musk is ex-payments professional and should have known that gaming payments to adversely attack verification was bound to happen. His assertion that lords and peasant system needs to be dismantled is absolutely correct, however. Twitter has largely turned into message distribution system for 1% and that's limiting its growth. Blue checkmarks bestowed by some opaque priesthood at Twitter is not 21st century.
> Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing.
I keep seeing this everywhere, that the switch from being verified to "payment verified" made that possible. It was possible to do this attack before the change. It just made it easier but also traceable with the payment info.
Is anyone really fooled by fake profiles? I thought twitter verification is a way to get boosted by the algo? I see many influencers with less than 10k followers that are verified. Who is going to impersonate them? No one.
Twitter itself pre-Musk started killing the meaning of bluechecks back in 2017, where they officially changed their rules from "this person is who he says he is" to "this person is who he says he is, and is politically correct". It was a controversy at the time: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/twitt...
I'm amazed that people have already forgotten this.
> 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 see this a lot in redesigns, and it's always "oh people aren't using this thing that I think they should, it must be because they don't know about it" and not "it must not be what they want".
It's like that thing that people do when they come into the room and say "oh why are you sitting in the dark" and switch on the lights, without stopping to check why you're sitting in the dark. I know how to switch on a light, it's just that right now I'm loading a camera.
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.
How was that not obvious? The current situation Twitter is in is the most naive prediction. If Mr. Musk needed someone to point this out to him and ask why it wouldn't go down this way, I'm not sure what to say. Hell, a bunch of comedians actually pointed this out by changing their names and avatars to Elon Musk and impersonating him. Elon banned them. It really should have clicked at this point.
> 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.
Given how obvious it is, a more logical premise might be to assume someone did and Elon chose to believe otherwise.
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)
> I actually liked the ~idea~ behind this but not the execution, which I can't believe was so bungled
How do you not bungle something you conceive, implement, and roll out to millions of users in 2 weeks (while in the middle of a massive wave of layoffs).
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.
From tweets Elon made before becoming the CEO of twitter, it seemed this was the approach he was aiming for.
I can only speculate that he dropped the identity verification part to get this to market quicker as this is the part which would have required new investment/systems/vendors.
I speculate taking a payment would have been relatively low complexity for Twitter to implement and possibly could have leveraged existing internal systems.
I wouldn't be surprised if one day Elon suddenly announces everybody paying $8/mth now needs to submit identity docs to continue to use service.
the original tweet kinda made it sound like thats what the plan was. they already attach labels to politicians and such, having a label of 'us senator' and a blue check is redundant, by being labeled they must be verified. if they expanded the labeling to include a bunch more things(and make it more visible in the UI).. its a much better system, labels replace verification and blue just becomes premium(though to be fair id probably pick a different icon)
> 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.
Companies everywhere are looking for safe way to reduce costs. The 5% drop was likely caused by unrelated market conditions, but the impersonation tweet 1) gives an alternative, more palatable explanation for the drop, and 2) provides cover for a CMO or exec to cut their Twitter spend.
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
> 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 :)
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.)
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.
Free speech protections in the U.S. make it extremely difficult for a company to pursue consequences for this sort of thing.
A previous employer was pranked via impersonation that was far more elaborate and convincing than one fake tweet. The corporate lawyers were able to get the fake website taken down, but any legal action beyond that was quickly dismissed.
There's also the "empty pocket" problem; it's not like Eli Lilly is going to actually get $billions in compensation from some random person on Twitter. The lawyer time to draft the complaint would probably cost more than the best possible award they could expect.
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
This has nothing to do with patients. These are pharma companies existing for the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder value by eking out very last drop of profits. They are just bullying Twitter with whatever leverage they have because Twitter is in unfortunate position where it doesn't provide value at the level where they are the one with leverage. These guys would have not dared this move on Google, for example.
They also lose a lawsuit on the day of that tweet (and the drop was pretty typical for that day on the market) so I'm not really convinced their stock was altered much by a fake tweet.
>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.
So the article suggests its only recovered 20% of the fall.
And anyway what is a fair amount of value to lose over a fake tweet? is 1% ok? 2%?
> 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.
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.
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.
One of the perks of twitter blue is way, way increased visibility. Even fresh accounts with zero followers will be shown. Add in a few friends or hell 10 bucks to give your post an initial intake of likes and suddenly that just becomes 18 dollars that potentially cost Musk even more billions. I couldn't find a more enjoyable use of 20 bucks than putting this clown in more trouble
> 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.
People would share it. Think: troll + random thing going viral. The troll gets the ball rolling, and not all trolls would succeed at that, but some would and after the initial push the ball would keep rolling on its own.
>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.
I'm not normally one to defend drug makers, but when you're talking about the loss of ~$15 billion in market cap[1], and then you factor in the fact that the company themselves was so frustrated by this that they walked away from their ad deal with Twitter, it all makes it hard for me to see how this is "overblown".
> It seems like it would only get picked up and shared by people in on the joke.
If I have a significant following on my main/normal account, then I can create the fake one and then retweet it on main, thus showing it to all my regular followers. From there it just needs a little normal organic traction - and yes, that includes many people who immediately understand the joke and are RT'ing it because it's fake.
Users would see it the same way they see everything else, but now the Tweet would have Eli Lilly's name, logo and a big blue "verified" check mark next to it. Yes they could do 3 seconds of diligence and check if the account is real or not, but if people actually did that then fake news wouldn't be a thing in the first place.
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?
- 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.
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.
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
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
> 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.
- 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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
scotty79|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
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.
danudey|3 years ago
1. Create a new Apple account
2. Buy a $10 iTunes gift card
3. Use that to pay for Twitter Blue
Would I pay $10 and twenty minutes of my time to knock $20bn off of an insulin profiteer's stock price? Absolutely. Put me down for a recurring subscription.
partiallypro|3 years ago
Getting verified previously with a small account was cumbersome and took ages.
DoesntMatter22|3 years ago
But this twitter thing beginning to end has mostly been a disaster. I think he's mostly unfairly hated, in that almost any CEO is as bad or worse but he's his own worst enemy with twitter.
He's alienated a lot of people and then alienates them more by saying people should boycott thier products.
lawn|3 years ago
To be completely fair, this is my feeling about the web Twitter and especially Reddit UI.
andrei_says_|3 years ago
It’s much worse than that. Selling the verification check mark to anyone with $8 poisoned the platform instantaneously.
It’s a bit like the DMV suddenly starting to sell driver licenses without any proof that you are who you say you are. Immediate erasure of the trustworthiness of any driver’s license, forever.
I cannot imagine that Musk was not aware or made aware of this consequence. He did it anyway.
Possibly after firing the people who warned him.
theshrike79|3 years ago
That's it. This whole debacle would've been instantly avoided.
blindseer|3 years ago
It remains to be seen if learning has occurred.
kadutskyi|3 years ago
sangnoir|3 years ago
I'm aware of no less than 3 formerly verified individuals who did tell him[1] before the feature launched, and he responded by banning them for impersonating him and instituting a "no lying about who you are" rule that empirically works on an honor system, or upon pain of forfeiting $8.
1. "Showed him" would be more accurate, but he shockingly failed to grasp the point they were making.
sytelus|3 years ago
PhasmaFelis|3 years ago
Extremely Fungible Tokens.
Ra8|3 years ago
cactusplant7374|3 years ago
Jiro|3 years ago
I'm amazed that people have already forgotten this.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
hayyyyydos|3 years ago
Interested in reading more about this, do you have any links?
Gordonjcp|3 years ago
I see this a lot in redesigns, and it's always "oh people aren't using this thing that I think they should, it must be because they don't know about it" and not "it must not be what they want".
It's like that thing that people do when they come into the room and say "oh why are you sitting in the dark" and switch on the lights, without stopping to check why you're sitting in the dark. I know how to switch on a light, it's just that right now I'm loading a camera.
2muchcoffeeman|3 years ago
How was that not obvious? The current situation Twitter is in is the most naive prediction. If Mr. Musk needed someone to point this out to him and ask why it wouldn't go down this way, I'm not sure what to say. Hell, a bunch of comedians actually pointed this out by changing their names and avatars to Elon Musk and impersonating him. Elon banned them. It really should have clicked at this point.
hysan|3 years ago
Given how obvious it is, a more logical premise might be to assume someone did and Elon chose to believe otherwise.
ahMath8|3 years ago
[deleted]
elijaht|3 years ago
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)
AlexandrB|3 years ago
How do you not bungle something you conceive, implement, and roll out to millions of users in 2 weeks (while in the middle of a massive wave of layoffs).
giarc|3 years ago
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/posta...
everfrustrated|3 years ago
I can only speculate that he dropped the identity verification part to get this to market quicker as this is the part which would have required new investment/systems/vendors.
I speculate taking a payment would have been relatively low complexity for Twitter to implement and possibly could have leveraged existing internal systems.
I wouldn't be surprised if one day Elon suddenly announces everybody paying $8/mth now needs to submit identity docs to continue to use service.
stevesearer|3 years ago
1) All tweets
2) Tweets by paid accounts (low verification)
3) Tweets by official accounts (high verification)
Bonus points to filter content by 1st party client vs 3rd party tweet schedulers
idunno246|3 years ago
throwuwu|3 years ago
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.
object-a|3 years ago
idunno246|3 years ago
kmlx|3 years ago
> 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 :)
Robotbeat|3 years ago
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.)
munificent|3 years ago
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.
snowwrestler|3 years ago
A previous employer was pranked via impersonation that was far more elaborate and convincing than one fake tweet. The corporate lawyers were able to get the fake website taken down, but any legal action beyond that was quickly dismissed.
There's also the "empty pocket" problem; it's not like Eli Lilly is going to actually get $billions in compensation from some random person on Twitter. The lawyer time to draft the complaint would probably cost more than the best possible award they could expect.
GaryNumanVevo|3 years ago
Alternatively: this sort of thing will always happen because it has the potentially to be very funny
dariusj18|3 years ago
ro_bit|3 years ago
Ah yes, the patient's trust in the company to rip them off on lifesaving drugs
dragontamer|3 years ago
sytelus|3 years ago
blitzar|3 years ago
falcolas|3 years ago
I have to imagine they're doing this for the continued exposure. There's no such thing as bad press and all that.
spywaregorilla|3 years ago
Alternatively phrased as after 3 days, only a mere 40% has been lost. Hits different though.
jjcon|3 years ago
They also lose a lawsuit on the day of that tweet (and the drop was pretty typical for that day on the market) so I'm not really convinced their stock was altered much by a fake tweet.
benj111|3 years ago
>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.
So the article suggests its only recovered 20% of the fall.
And anyway what is a fair amount of value to lose over a fake tweet? is 1% ok? 2%?
Spivak|3 years ago
searchableguy|3 years 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.
ctvo|3 years ago
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.
Krasnol|3 years ago
But maybe that's some genius plan with a spectacular outcome that I fail to see.
x86_64Ubuntu|3 years ago
legitster|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
ohgodplsno|3 years ago
tablespoon|3 years ago
> 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.
People would share it. Think: troll + random thing going viral. The troll gets the ball rolling, and not all trolls would succeed at that, but some would and after the initial push the ball would keep rolling on its own.
jjulius|3 years ago
From the 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.
I'm not normally one to defend drug makers, but when you're talking about the loss of ~$15 billion in market cap[1], and then you factor in the fact that the company themselves was so frustrated by this that they walked away from their ad deal with Twitter, it all makes it hard for me to see how this is "overblown".
[1]https://gizmodo.com/twitter-eli-lilly-elon-musk-insulin-1849...
fknorangesite|3 years ago
If I have a significant following on my main/normal account, then I can create the fake one and then retweet it on main, thus showing it to all my regular followers. From there it just needs a little normal organic traction - and yes, that includes many people who immediately understand the joke and are RT'ing it because it's fake.
paxys|3 years ago
yawnxyz|3 years ago
dottrap|3 years ago
- 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.
giarc|3 years ago
https://etfdb.com/etfs/industry/pharmaceutical/
unknown|3 years ago
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mgraczyk|3 years ago
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.
labrador|3 years ago
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-los...
oceanplexian|3 years ago
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.
erite|3 years ago
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watwut|3 years ago
- 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.
pyrale|3 years ago
Overtonwindow|3 years ago
danudey|3 years ago
All that and zero downsides? That's a huge win in my book.
isitmadeofglass|3 years ago
tibbydudeza|3 years ago
What a glorious shit show.
yalogin|3 years ago
jahlove|3 years ago
klyrs|3 years ago
benchtobedside|3 years ago
HN then modified it to its current ugly form.
throwaway14356|3 years ago
abeppu|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
petilon|3 years ago
IAmGraydon|3 years ago
consumer451|3 years ago
hn2017|3 years ago
BrainVirus|3 years ago
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weakfish|3 years ago
kelseyfrog|3 years ago
nativespecies|3 years ago
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gardenhedge|3 years ago
BitwiseFool|3 years ago
fragmede|3 years ago