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Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

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Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

#111

Post by stevesearer »

elijaht wrote: post #87

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…

I was imagining a way to filter content into three buckets:

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

Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

#112

Post by duskwuff »

partiallypro wrote: post #62
danudey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 subscrip…

You can block gift cards in most payment gateways, I imagine you could do similar with Apple's system. There also is mixed evidence that Eli Lilly's stock actually went down from the tweet, given it reacted hours after the tweet and never recovered (usually fake news items effecting price will immediately correct back to the previous trading level.) Several articles I read about it bury this deep in the article, basi…

If you're accepting payments for in-app purchases through iOS, all the billing for that happens through Apple. The app developer has no control (or knowledge) of how those payments were funded.

Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

#113

Post by [deleted] »

danudey wrote: post #39
scotty79 wrote: post #7

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 w…

> 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 subscrip…

[deleted]

Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

#114

Post by idunno246 »

throwuwu wrote: post #84

> 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 trad…

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

Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

#115

Post by fragmede »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #107

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.

Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

#116

Post by theshrike79 »

scotty79 wrote: post #7

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 w…

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.

Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

#117

Post by mbaum9 »

sytelus wrote: post #60
scotty79 wrote: post #7

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 w…

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 f…

It’s not Twitter’s fault when stock market bots go wild.

Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

#118

Post by techsupporter »

partiallypro wrote: post #62
danudey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 subscrip…

You can block gift cards in most payment gateways, I imagine you could do similar with Apple's system. There also is mixed evidence that Eli Lilly's stock actually went down from the tweet, given it reacted hours after the tweet and never recovered (usually fake news items effecting price will immediately correct back to the previous trading level.) Several articles I read about it bury this deep in the article, basi…

> You can block gift cards in most payment gateways, I imagine you could do similar with Apple's system.

What GP means is to go to a grocery store and lay out 10 American Dollars for an Apple-branded services gift card (what used to be called an iTunes Gift Card). One of these: https://www.apple.com/shop/gift-cards

You apply it to the brand new Apple ID you've made and use those virtual funds to make the in-app purchase in the Twitter app that, at the time, was the method of paying for Twitter Blue. (The purchase page even said/says, "You can only subscribe on the Twitter iOS app (for now).")

No blocking of prepaid or gift cards here; you're doing exactly what Apple wants and it's not Apple's problem that Twitter takes IAPs for a "verified" service.

Re: Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

#119

Post by idunno246 »

elijaht wrote: post #87

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…

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)
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