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.
What we have here is a failure to communicate - Musk suffers from Tony Stark Syndrome which is caused by excessive exposure to Ayn Rand novels, Marvel Comics and Twinkie's.
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.
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.
Government incentives helped them get to their current level of profitability. Not just in the US either: in Norway, for instance, there's a huge environmental tax on gas-burning cars, but EVs are exempt since they don't burn fossil fuel, so Teslas end up being quite cheap by comparison and are therefore very popular there.
You're being disingenuous by claiming carbon credits are the only form of government largesse or incentive.
Sure they helped the company, but it's not like they handed them 10 billion dollars. And at this point they make up so little of the cost. Every car company had this same opportunity but they passed it up.
Don't fault Tesla for that as if the government is propping them up. At this point very little of Tesla's money comes from.
You using Norway is disingenuous they have just over half the population of New Jersey. They are incredibly small. Meanwhile Tesla is #1 in all of Europe.
The Federal government, and state governments, and various EU governments have given tax credits to buyers of Tesla cars since almost the beginning of Tesla.
> 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 (mastodon.social) is not accepting new invites.
I'd put my money on something new taking Twitter's place way before Mastodon.
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.
>I'd put my money on something new taking Twitter's place way before Mastodon.
Something new, like what? When there's a big user exodus from some kind of service or platform, there has to be something for them to flock to right then. When Digg imploded, Reddit was there to absorb the exodus. Right now, Mastodon is there, even if it has significant downsides. Users aren't just going to wait around for something ideal to be built for them.
>> 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 to the list of scammers & criminals the additional bots, trolls, and pranksters, all of whom can rapidly destroy trust in a community (online or off).
Why he didn't carry that lesson forward to this platform is baffling (unless he's in a contest with Kanye and the FTX crypto guy to see who can create the largest and most rapid-burning money bonfire).
Although, especially since he still made significant fortune from it, it still seems sufficient exposure to at least understand the concept of a minority of scammers & criminals who must be identified & shut off in real time (maybe even more exposure if he came up through two precursor companies).
Heck, it is something that is already obvious to everyone here, and most of us were never employed in banking or payments operations...
> 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.
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, basically alluding to "we'll never actually know why the stock went down." I would imagine their new Alzheimer's drug looming had more to do with it, but idk. It also becomes slightly questionable about if a quant, etc fund would not know the difference between accounts, when you really think about it...it sounds improbable.
> 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.
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.
The FTC would look at people who recently bought short term call options against Eli Lily stock and ask them questions. Pretty much the same playbook anytime bad news causes a stock price to go down. Matt Levine notes this as a common way people get caught doing insider trading each time it comes up.
It's normally combined with recorded IM conversations along the lines of "bro, I bought some short term chickens for Lli Eily. Let's make them CLUCK with this tweet." You call them chickens, or something similar, to try and fool the FTC. This is also a surprisingly common occurrence during insider trading investigations.
The SEC definitely targets sudden, surprising stock moves, and looks for people who profited off them. (This is why one of Matt Levine's tongue-in-cheek 'rules for insider trading- this is not legal advice!' is never do it in short dated, out-of-the-money options!) I'm sure there are relatively sophisticated ways to exploit the market that the SEC probably won't catch (that are also more sophisticated than I understand), but now you need to have a sophisticated understanding of the market, and of cybersecurity fraud (to beat Twitters payments verification), and naturally maintain flawless opsec on both throughout. Harder and harder to do.
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.
> Unverified accounts provide most of the good content on Twitter,
I don't think good content is the core value of twitter. In my perception value of twitter is who said what. Good or bad.
I don't use twitter and have contact with twitter only when it's cited elsewhere and bulk of most popular citations are mostly not "here's interesting thought someone had on twitter" but rather "this celebrity/politician/office tweeted that".
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.
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.
True, but who wants the dollar-store version if the verification mark? Twitter is/was selling the prestige of the badge and what it represents to some, specifically "I am a notable individual". Any other symbol would only mean "I paid $8 for this", and my guess is that isn't quite as compelling.
If you asked Elon (atleast before he stepped into Twitter HQ) I'm sure he'd disagree with you, and he'd claim good ideas can come from anywhere and it shouldn't matter who they are or if they are important.
It's classic "If I don't understand it, then it must be easy" syndrome.
Oh, Twitter is full of bots! So when I'm in charge I'm going to press the "no more bots" button and save Twitter! Also, the company only needs half this much staff, so we're going to spend a few days firing half of them and then the company will be better off!
Elon's not gonna learn because that would tarnish his image of someone who has any idea what the heck he's doing.
And the company is doing too many RPC calls. And we will take down overbloated "microservices" (where the apostrophes kinda give suggest he is not at home with the concept).
RPC calls is like ATM machine. Musk’s tweet says RPC’s. The person quoted everywhere arguing with Musk over it’s tweet says RPC calls. Does that count as apostrophe misuse suggesting not being at home with the concept as well?
You can have a fake ID.
I would calculate that "payment verified" is way cheaper than full identity verification. But it's easier to create several iClouds with the same cc, so you still need to check IDs, but you can compare newly created accounts (or ones that changed their name) with existing accounts and check for similarities and flag those accounts. The thing is that you can automate that and you need to do that only for a small percent of subscribed users.
Instead of fully checking everyone's identity you check only flagged accounts.
> It's really a bit surprising that noone told him that his tweets are worth anything only because people reading them can know they come from Elon not some guy who paid 8$ 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.
I don't think the previous rule required one to have to have the word "parody" on the display name, not just the bio.
Elon lowered the bar for triggering the rule , and made the punishment harsher: insta-ban, from someone who was against perma-bans less than 20 days ago - that change to an old rule is so large,it might as well be a new rule.
Given a list of all twitter bans, there would surely be many that we would both agree are obvious parodies. So, obvious is relative, or, a grey area/high weasel potential area to do what you want. So it’s not obvious that anything has changed there either. That’s besides the point though that, while widely reported and repeated, Musk, as far as I’m aware, did not institute the rule about impersonation.
If you seriously think that Nintendo would tweet a picture of Mario "flipping the bird", you don't come across as a neutral arbiter, you come across as someone ridiculous.
So let me get this straight: what I think about whether a picture of Mario being rude is a joke or not determines if Elon Musk instituted a rule about impersonation? That makes no sense. You also throw ideas around like me pretending to be an arbiter around, makes no sense either. Why do you need it to be about me?
“What else are ‘we’ to think?” That’s arbiter talk buddy.
Seems to me like you’re trying to drag me personally into a bickering match, I won’t hazard a guess as why.
First thing you replied to (reworded for clarity) I think Mario being rude is a joke, I think other times things that are obvious jokes have also been banned. And that’s what this Mario thing is right: joke gets twitter account banned? It’s faulty reasoning for you to assume I know much of anything about Nintendoofus internet drama but I don’t think I need to as long as it boils down to banned for joke.
But I also think, and this is most important of all: that what I think has nothing to do with whether Musk instituted a rule or not. That should not be shocking.
Here’s a story anyone at home can confirm or not, before I posted the first comment, I tried to look it up to see if it was true: ‘did Elon musk institute a rule about impersonation’ had to reword a few times and scroll through many pages of news articles from all around the world repeating what I would call the same outrage clickbait from seemingly the same script, before I found a snopes article that actually answered the question and no he did not institute such a rule. That’s interesting and worth pointing out imo for the readers here that are interested in getting full stories, because as I’ve already said, that he instituted such a rule is widely reported and repeated, and is (afaik) incorrect.
>"So let me get this straight: what I think about whether a picture of Mario being rude is a joke or not determines if Elon Musk instituted a rule about impersonation? "
No, what you think about the Nintendoofus context reflects upon your judgment. Which I pointed out was incredibly questionable seeing as how you are somehow incapable of putting the words together to acknowledge it is obvious parody.
That your next step is to write this whole ridiculous long response based upon a premise that isn't even in question is... telling.
Ok. I think going further would bring no benefit and would run against site guidelines. Posting this so you don’t wait for a reply that isn’t coming. Thank you and have a good day.
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.
"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."
But at least the blue check system was mostly correct. Imagine how much a blue check would cost if it was opened to the public and the level of verification pre-elon was used .
Right now the $8 was just a code change and let's just call it 100% profit. With actual verification you'd need a bunch more people and one of those identity verification services and now that $8 isn't pure profit
They need an extra 1 billion per year. 1,000,000,000.00/($8X12 months) = 10.5 million verifications of pictures and IDs. Work force slashed in half. Questionable management decision making. Seems like the head winds are pretty strong for not being really successful or getting true verification implemented.
> His assertion that lords and peasant system needs to be dismantled is absolutely correct, however.
Not such a great system when a bunch of peasants convince themselves to believe in lies. "Everyone gets a voice to say damaging things" is the road to ruin.
> His assertion that lords and peasant system needs to be dismantled is absolutely correct, however.
But what if the entire business model was/is actually a lord and peasant system. Whereby lords can, while verified and identified as lords, communicate with the masses of pesants without any other gatekeepers.
The peasants having their chit chat on the side isnt the point, that is the noise and the lords are the signal.
> Twitter has largely turned into message distribution system for 1%
The Twitter user base is massively non-Western. Within the West it skews non-White.
Your assertions are meaningless garbage and betray a complete lack of how Twitter works and who uses it, comprising merely the braying of the far-right greivance industry.
> Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ 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).
By not missing on the core feature? The MVP for this was not taking payments and putting a sign, it was having an actual verification, no matter how basic.
I also don't understand how it got to this bondoggle. I always imagined it was going to use the payment for verification: you can get a blue mark for John Smith only if you pay with a card belonging to John Smith. That can be automated in 2 weeks, no problem. And then add more complex verification procedures for companies, brands and non-name accounts.
I'm also reserving some probability mass for "we didn't get the whole story". Something like 25% that was an already verified account or something like that.
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.
"May you live in interesting times" is a curse, not a blessing. People tune into disasters. Trolling aside, twitter has become hugely introspective over the last few weeks, which isn't particularly interesting.
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.
I've used it once, but I can't remember why.
Whatever company was using it, sent me a postcard with a barcode or something on it. It gave instructions for me to walk into any Canada Post and hand over my ID and the post card. The staff verified my ID and then scanned the barcode. I was then verified. It was quite a while ago, likely before most of the 'online ID verification' companies existed. I'm not sure how they compare in terms of cost, accuracy and compliance.
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 :)
> 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
Ads may have gone down for a number of factors, may also include the fact that Twitter is not really in a place that is good for advertising due to enormous amounts of hostile users
The "damaging tweet" in question was gone long before the stock would've been in a reasonable timeframe to "react" to it.
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
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.
Why do you assume there isn't one already? The "War on Drugs" was never just about illegal drugs across borders, and US Customs will try to stop many legal ones too, especially at volume.
Patients seldom have a choice in any aspect of their care. We could flood the market with dirt cheap insulin using an older formulation but surprise you can’t actually do that without one of the oligarchs buying your company just to stop you.
Or the dirt cheap insulin does not work as well as the newer patented insulin that a private company paid to do R&D for.
There is nothing stopping Congress from passing a bill to fund insulin R&D that provides the newest insulin technology without being patented, but the fact that they do not and would rather sit in their pulpit and “grill” private company representatives proves that it is all a show.
We (sufficient voters) want to pay for nothing, but expect everything.
The patents on lispro (the stuff that costs $300/vial) expired several years ago.
The fact is, Lilly isn't even the largest profiteer. The insane margins of insulin are actually split between Lilly, PBMs (like optumRX and CareMark) and insurance companies, through an incredibly complex system of rebates and vouchers. Turning over that rock reveals more writhing maggots than anyone cares to see.
> The insane margins of insulin are actually split between Lilly, PBMs (like optumRX and CareMark) and insurance companies, through an incredibly complex system of rebates and vouchers. Turning over that rock reveals more writhing maggots than anyone cares to see.
Health insurance companies (parent companies of PBMs) have low single digit profit margins, and medicine manufacturers like Eli Lilly have 20%+ profit margins. If health insurance companies are getting any piece of the "insane" profit margin, then it is being eaten up by losses of other healthcare spend.
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.
I looked it up and a fifty percent savings is pretty good, but that is still a pretty high price for something that has to be taken forever and is twice as expensive as non generic in every other country.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...
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.
> You are freee to keep your money and die if you prefer.
Just to be clear, you're proposing that "freedom" means "do what this corporations wants you to do or die".
If this were anywhere but Hacker News, I'd think you were joking, but... you're being serious, aren't you?
And let me guess: if a government says, "do what we want you to do, or die", that's regulation and therefore bad, because it's a government doing it, not a corporation?
Well, if it's any comfort, it's usually not this bad. I only usually come across this on Hacker News, which is why I have to limit my time here for my own mental health. Some people are so dogmatic about capitalism here that they become indistinguishable from sociopaths.
It's why I call this[1] "The Hacker News Trolley Problem".
> If this were anywhere but Hacker News, I'd think you were joking, but... you're being serious, aren't you?
How did you come to that conclusion? I mean, there is a lot of earnest extreme libertarianism on HN, but not nearly so much that you can assume a comment like the GP isn't sarcastic.
The correct interpretation is somewhere between "sarcastic" and "too ambiguous to tell" without digging into comment history.
> the patient's trust in the company to rip them off on lifesaving drugs
So is it dont trust the company to a) have drugs that will save your life (i.e. rip you off by giving you sugar pills) b) make you pay a price that is "not worth it" (i.e. a higher price than your life is worth).
My reference to freedom is literal, nothing to do with government or any other agenda - perhaps other interpretations are loaded with an agenda. IF you dont trust a product, dont use it. You dont have to - you are free to make theses choices. Many people, especially at very advanced ages or sickness opt to forgo expensive treatments that would offer them an extra 6 months of life because it 'isnt worth it'. Some people dont believe that conventional treatments will cure them - see Steve Jobs.
As for my personal political view which seems to be the real attack vector here - for those that fall into neither category, i.e believe the medication will save their lives, feel it is worth it but do not have the money for it. Well in the civilized world, their countries agree with them that their life is worth it and that is how they get their medication and we collectively have healthcare.
If your options are "do what someone else wants you to do" or "die", that's not freedom. Literally not freedom. Whether you trust or don't trust the person, is completely irrelevant to the fact that your very survival is conditioned on obedience.
And sure, it does seem like somehow you arrive at the conclusion that people who can't pay for life-saving healthcare should have collective help.
But, in a way, not understanding what freedom is, is actually more fundamental than that. Even if people can pay for life-saving treatments, why is it acceptable that they would have to? In what context would it be acceptable to threaten to kill someone if they don't pay you a ransom?
Freedom does not exist if all the options are obviously terrible.
HN downvotes enough unmarked sarcasm as a culture that most regular "non-green name" commenters on HN prone to (good) sarcastic tones learn quickly to try to mark it (/s, ~, </sarcasm>, however you prefer). I know I also generally assume that unmarked text is not sarcasm nor ambiguous on HN.
Well, admittedly it was a guess, but it was an educated guess based on past experience with HN, and as you can see from blitzar's followup post, I guessed correctly.
That's the key word: lost. Nothing's been lost - neither Eli Lilly nor their shareholders have lost any money (unless they sold their stock, at which point they aren't shareholders). The price of their stock dipped, and is rising back up.
At worst, Eli Lilly would have had slightly higher interest rates on their next round of debt funding.
You're assuming that brand value has no financial value. Forget the stock price, this probably impacted EliLilly's brand in a way that will cost a bunch of money to "fix". If it sparks renewed calls for regulatory action on insulin prices, it could cost them quite a bit more than just brand value as well - either in lobbying, political "contributions", or profits. But that's speculation for now.
The people selling based off of tweetstorms or breaking news are not mom and pop investors saving for retirement. They’re day traders trying to squeeze profit out of fluctuations.
Timing the market is impossible, besides selling now would be a good thing if they bought the stock at any point more than 1 month ago. Go look at the stock chart.
The stock has recovered 60% of the maybe-Twitter-related losses. The stock lost 5% of its value on November 11th, and recovered 60% of that to date which means the maybe-Twitter-related drop in value is 40% of 5%, or 2%.
However, Friday also saw a broad drop in pharma stocks. If I'm quite generous I'd say 50% of that 2% can be attributed to the Twitter tomfoolery.
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%?
I'm looking at the actual stock market as of right now. They've been trading for hours, and their price is up overall.
> And anyway what is a fair amount of value to lose over a fake tweet? is 1% ok? 2%?
Given that when the stock prices return and continue to rise - there's no actual monetary losses... sure. Those are all fine. At worst, their interest rates on new loans would be a bit higher is all.
Average daily volume of Ely Lilly is 3 million shares - at $356 price/share that's $1,068,000,000 traded each day affected, not to mention stock option premiums jumping due to heightened volatility, etc.,. I'm pretty sure there were some actual monetary losses in there.
This company is doing the same thing plenty of other companies and people are doing, this company just went through a bit worse before it made that decision.
> 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.
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
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.
hilariously the font that Twitter uses has capital-i look the same as lowercase-L, so when @AppIeOfCA tweeted as a verified account, it was really hard to distinguish from the real @AppleOfCA account.
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".
People's reaction are varied, this tweet actually resonates with people's beliefs much more strongly than what you might expect. For a lot of people, medicine that you need to continue living should be free. So I would say when this went viral, people at the very least go: "hmm...".
Couple that with reactions from politicians and suddenly you find yourself in a situation where the price of insulin is once again being questioned.
So imo, it's not just a funny tweet but more like a conversation starter and so it absolutely makes sense to me why this would be reflected in the stock price of insulin makers as a whole.
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.
This sounds like nonsense to me. Tweets didn't bring down the stock price of multiple drugmakers, market volatility did. Pharma market cap will go up or down by more than that on a daily basis for a thousand and one reasons.
Depends on your perspective. A good thing, collectively, for society. A bad thing for the health and longevity of Twitter in it's current state, and I think that's how it's being framed in most of these discussions.
> 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.
> 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.
And a world where Eli Lilly is forced to advertise on Twitter is totalitarian. Their only agenda in this instance is not supporting fake news. They should be applauded.
- 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.
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.