Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

endpts.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 222 posts

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

#171

Post by dorkwood »

fragmede wrote: post #169
dorkwood wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow the stock. What's the real reason it's down?

> 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

So I suppose they're pulling Twitter ad spend for other reasons? I guess this whole fiasco is still damaging to their brand.

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

#172

Post by regpertom »

watwut wrote: post #44
danudey wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's classic "If I don't understand it, then it must be easy" syndrome. Oh, Twitter is full of bots! So when I'm in charge I'm going to press the "no more bots" button and save Twitter! Also, the company only needs half this much staff, so we're going to spend a few days firing half of them and then the company will be better off! Elon's not gonna learn because that would tarnish his image of someone who has any idea…

And the company is doing too many RPC calls. And we will take down overbloated "microservices" (where the apostrophes kinda give suggest he is not at home with the concept).

RPC calls is like ATM machine. Musk’s tweet says RPC’s. The person quoted everywhere arguing with Musk over it’s tweet says RPC calls. Does that count as apostrophe misuse suggesting not being at home with the concept as well?

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

#173

Post by regpertom »

sangnoir wrote: post #135
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…

> 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…

Musk didn’t institute that rule, the rule was already in place. Musk’s change was to ban without first giving a warning.

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

#174

Post by dottrap »

yawnxyz wrote: post #78

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?

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.

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

#175

Post by Jcowell »

leereeves wrote: post #155
AlexandrB wrote: post #122

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.

> Twitter hasn't been this interesting in years.

Maybe for some. Black Twitter had some great sagas.

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

#176

Post by giraffe_lady »

leereeves wrote: post #155
AlexandrB wrote: post #122

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.

Is this the opinion of an active twitter user, or from outside? He's certainly making things interesting for spectators but the people who were already there using it don't seem that pleased from what I can tell.

Also idk about you but I've been in tech about a decade, seen a lot of the changes the startup era has wrought on our world and I can't hear "move fast and break things" as anything positive anymore. I wish we had gone a little slower, we broke some things I think we needed.

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

#177

Post by scotty79 »

toss1 wrote: post #148
tablespoon wrote: post #21

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…

>> he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted. This is particularly surprising to me also, for a different reason. Since Musk was a key player at PayPal, he should have learned that although the vast majority of users are well-intentioned and harmless, there are a small group of scammers and criminal who MUST be dealt with or they will rapidly bankrupt you. On Twitter, we must add t…

> Since Musk was a key player at PayPal

That's mostly a legend. In actuality he took some part in some company that got bought by another company which eventually became PayPal.

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

#178

Post by iudqnolq »

nemothekid wrote: post #25
gruez wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

It's also completely plausible for a real, situationally important authority to have very few followers.

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

#179

Post by partiallypro »

blackoil wrote: post #170
partiallypro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Blue tick was something that was seen as authority and was coveted, Musk wouldn't have got one tenth of people to subscribe for golden tick.

The blue check isn't coveted by most, there's even a meme about it being a mark of shame. I really think people that don't use Twitter often overestimate the importance of blue check accounts. If anything, they are the butt of a lot of jokes/content vs creating it. I am interested in the new Twitter Blue, but actually don't want the checkmark, but think it needs more features.

That being said, a normal user shouldn't have the same mark as an official Microsoft or government account. A secondary mark make sense, especially imo if only other paid and verified accounts can see the mark (I would just make it a hollow verified icon vs it being a different color.) Then it creates a network "in crowd" effect (similar to the green v blue text bubbles.) You also need to pair that with better tools and features.

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

#180

Post by ahMath8 »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #161
system16 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also doesn't help that there's a Twitter replacement (Mastodon) waiting in the wings As much as I want to see Mastodon succeed, I don't see it ever happening. Its biggest feature (multiple instances) is also the biggest reason most users are never going to use it. It's just too confusing for the end user. Also it's bizarre that the one instance that actually has the potential to gain mainstream interest (mastodo…

Everything about mastadon seems pretty bad in that way. You basically just need to clone how twitter works an go from there

These days that’s a Put tweet lambda and Get tweet lambda that autoscale with traffic, and copy pasting a copy cat UI from GitHub.

The last decade has been spent making something like Twitter today a simple shell script.

Companies would be better off improving internal customer service for existing users than astroturfing for new users. You know actually build a business rather than rely on hype for simple things the world used to find complex.

Post reply on HN