Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly saw its stock drop by 2.2 per cent on Friday after a verified troll Twitter account pretended to be it and tweeted that insulin was now free. A day later, its stock was down by a further 4.3 per cent, wiping billions from the company’s market cap.
The incident is the latest flaw in Elon Musk’s plan to roll out wider verification. It also led the new Twitter boss to suspend Twitter Blue activities for the time being.
Originally, the blue check badge was reserved for users who are public figures or verified to be who they say they are. Seeing the badge meant that users could attribute the tweets from the account to the person, although, on rare occasions, like when accounts are hacked, we have seen suspicious tweets from verified accounts in the past.
However, the difference is that you only needed $8 to pass yourself off as a notable brand, especially if you can maneuver the @username to seem slightly legit.
For example, the account that posted about the free insulin was @EliLillyandCo, while the original Twitter account of the pharmaceutical giant is @LillyPad. With the verification badge on the two accounts, anyone could have even believed the troll account to be legit.
What is more, insulin costs have been a delicate matter in the US, and it did not help the company’s image as it came out to fact-check the fake account saying, “We apologize to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake Lilly account.”
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Immediately, it gave aggrieved users the opportunity to speak up against the prices of insulin. Thus, casting the company in a bad light and pushing the price of its shares down.
According to a Fortune report, Eli Lilly stock is not the only high-profile casualty of the new Twitter verification for $8 policy. The outlet reported that Aerospace company and weapons supplier Lockheed Martin also suffered a loss of 5% after a fake account claimed that it was stopping weapons sales to countries like the US and others. It also mentioned Nintendo and Valve being victims.
With how easy it is to pass as legit on Twitter, the verification badge was one of the ways to separate the chaff from the wheat. Now, we have to wait for the platform to weed out fake accounts, which could keep popping up now and then.
Elon Musk had announced that accounts impersonating another should bear ‘parody’ in their user name or risk being suspended permanently without warning. Yet, it seems like a long way to tweak an already good system.
In addition, with the chaos at the employee level within the company, there is doubt that there are enough hands to handle the checks that need to be carried out. The platform is also testing an ‘official’ tag that tells users that a verified account is an official one of the company.
The only silver lining now is that since Twitter is a private company, Elon Musk can do what he likes without fear of shareholders pulling their investments and sinking the company. He only has to answer to everyone who helped finance his $44 billion acquisition.
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