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

41–50 of 222 posts

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

#41

Post by danudey »

blindseer wrote: post #29
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…

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. It remains to be seen if learning has occurred.

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 what the heck he's doing.

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

#42

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

searchableguy wrote: post #5

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.

I would think any verified account worth buying on the grey market would be worth more than $8.

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

#43

Post by watwut »

labrador wrote: post #18

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/corp... Elon Mus…

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.

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

#44

Post by watwut »

danudey wrote: post #41
blindseer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. It remains to be seen if learning has occurred.

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).

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

#45

Post by danudey »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #16

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

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.

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

#46

Post by belval »

mirzap wrote: post #9
dragontamer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patients seem to trust that Eli Lilly's drugs work. The price point may not be trusted, but its efficacy is trusted.

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.

Why is there no black market for insulin? Like build capacity in Mexico/Canada and smuggle the product in the US? Seems like the multiplier would still be pretty good.

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

#47

Post by abeppu »

> 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."

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

#48

Post by rhaway84773 »

abeppu wrote: post #47

> 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 fumble…

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.

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

#49

Post by rhaway84773 »

mirzap wrote: post #9
dragontamer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patients seem to trust that Eli Lilly's drugs work. The price point may not be trusted, but its efficacy is trusted.

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.

Which still doesn’t mean that patients aren’t trusting Eli Lilly. Given the fact that they are choosing to spend a lot of dollars buying its drugs indicates that they do trust the efficacy of the drugs.

Also, the fact that the drug costs a few bucks everywhere else on the planet but not in the U.S. suggests this isn’t as much of an Eli Lilly problem as it is a USA problem.

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

#50

Post by georgemcbay »

legitster wrote: post #40
jjulius wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is the fake accounts thing overblown? 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 ta…

> The Twitter stunt pulled down the stock price of other diabetes drugmakers, including Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. It seems much, much more likely the stock loss was part of a larger market event than a specific Twitter stunt.

I have no idea if the tweet was actually directly related to the price drop and lean toward being skeptical of it, but I don't think those other companies also dropping is great proof of that.

Assuming the tweet was believed to be real (by enough of the right people to cause this sort of stock move), the expected outcome would be drops in those other companies as well, since Lilly giving insulin away (the tweet was: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”) would obviously cause a large impact on their ability to continue to sell it.

Post reply on HN