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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

#151

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 Int…

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.

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

#152
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively This is what gets me. He's basically speedrunning a world-class demonstration of the lesson of Chesterton's fence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

If twitter is bleeding money so fast, slow changes of direction are not the first choice

A substantial portion (more than half?) of its bleeding is a direct result of Musk's purchase of twitter. The debt he introduced is the bulk of it, but it is compounded by a reduction in advertising revenue.

edit: to make this observation into an actual point: I'm not sure that a situation is a good justification when you're the reason for the situation.

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

#153
post #91
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. 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.

No, it literally had not happened before.

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

#154
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…

No post body was provided.

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

#155
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 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).

He's moving fast and breaking things.

Eventually I suspect things will get fixed and Twitter will probably benefit from the attention. Twitter hasn't been this interesting in years.

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

#156

> 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…

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 :)

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

He's moving fast and breaking things. Eventually I suspect things will get fixed and Twitter will probably benefit from the attention. Twitter hasn't been this interesting in years.

At the rate it's going possibly he might just shut down Twitter for a few months and then relaunch it. More excitement and less of all this

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

#158
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…

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.

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

#159
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…

And if you shorted Lilly at the same time, you'll probably soon be getting a visit from men in dark suits.

"Some men just want to watch the world burn."

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

#160
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sh…

The biggest difference between Twitter and every one of Musk's successful companies is that his typical ventures absolutely depend on US federal largesse to survive. Unless Twitter can start selling carbon credits or secure some bloated federal contracts, there is no chance in hell that Twitter is going to be in the black any time soon.

This is just completely untrue for Tesla. Carbon credits make up less than 10 percent of Tesla's profit. They had 250 million in carbon credits last quarter and 3.3 billion profit.
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