But the tweet was fake — one of what has become a fast-growing crowd of impersonated businesses, political leaders, government agencies and celebrities. By the time Twitter removed the tweet, more than six hours later, the account had inspired other Eli Lilly fakes and it has been viewed millions of times.
Inside the real Eli Lilly, the counterfeiting caused panic, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Company officials tried to contact Twitter representatives and asked them to kill the viral hoax, worried that it could undermine their brand’s reputation or promote false claims about people’s medicines. Twitter, its staff cut in half, did not respond for hours.
The fallout from this $8 scam offers a potentially costly lesson for Musk, who has long treated Twitter as a playground for pranksters and weirdo trolls, but now must find a way to operate as a business after his receipt of 44 billion dollars.
By Friday morning, Eli Lilly executives had ordered a halt to all ad campaigns on Twitter — a potentially serious blow, given that the $330 billion company controls the kind of massive advertising budget that Musk says the company needs to avoid bankruptcy. . They also stopped their Twitter publishing plan for all corporate accounts worldwide.
“For $8, they’re potentially losing millions of dollars in advertising revenue,” said Amy O’Connor, a former senior communications official at Eli Lilly who now works at a trade association. “What is the benefit to a company … of being on Twitter? It’s not worth the risk when the patient’s trust and health are on the line.”
Eli Lilly, which declined to answer questions about the episode or how much money it spent on Twitter ads, is one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical makers, known for the antidepressant Prozac and diabetes treatments Trulicity and Humalog.
She maintains a strong presence on Twitter. In addition to its main corporate account, @LillyPadhe runs dedicated independent accounts diabetes care, European health policy, clinical trials, rheumatology and distribution of health information to Spanish, Italian AND french. According to MediaRadar, a marketing data firm, it spends more than $100 million a year on TV ads and digital ad campaigns in the United States.
When Twitter failed to respond quickly to his pleas about the fake account, Eli Lilly took to its official account late Thursday afternoon to apologize to its 130,000 followers for “deceptive” false. When the fake account was still active five hours later, a Twitter advertising sales representative in New York he prayed publicly with Musk having the fake account removed.
Musk did not respond, but the account was suspended late Thursday evening. The next morning, Musk posted on Twitter that the rollout of Twitter’s new $8 verification regime was “generally going well”.
Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Twitter’s communications team also did not respond; many of its employees were laid off in the mass layoff Musk ordered on November 4.
In a brief statement Friday, Eli Lilly said it was “working to remedy this situation.”
Musk has said the sweeping change to Twitter’s “verified” system, first revealed in 2009, will shock journalists at the institution he routinely criticizes for breaking “oligopoly on information.”
Twitter is not verifying the identity of anyone who pays $8 for the verification token, which looks identical to the current “verified” badge. Musk has said that spammers and impersonators will be discouraged by the fact that their $8 will not be returned if their accounts are suspended.
The sudden switch, however, has destroyed some of the last shreds of trust among advertisers on the platform, said Jenna Golden, who led Twitter’s political ad and advocacy sales team until 2017 and now runs Golden Strategies, a consulting firm. DC.
Twitter, she said, has never been a “must buy” for advertisers. While a popular way to reach influential political figures and news junkies, it has never had the scale and performance of digital juggernauts like Google and Facebook.
Now, with its piecemeal verification system, “it’s making it really easy for advertisers to say, ‘You know what, I don’t need to be here anymore,’ and walk away,” Golden said. “People are not only providing inaccurate information, but damaging information, with the ability to appear legitimate. This is not a sustainable place for a brand to invest.”
Complicating matters, Golden said, is Musk himself, who has driven tumultuous changes at the company that have baffled paying customers, confused industry watchers and sent Twitter power users heading for the exits.
“People see the leader of this company as erratic and unpredictable, who is making very rough decisions and reversing them very quickly,” she said. “He claims he wants to build a successful business, then does everything he can to turn off the advertisers who are his main stream of income. … I just don’t see a world in which advertisers are going to be excited to come back and willing to shell out dollars for his experiment.”
As fake accounts proliferated on the site Thursday, Musk responded with an apparent sexual act I tweet from a fake President Biden with two crying emojis and tweets that Twitter users had common “Some epically funny tweets.”
However, by Friday morning, Twitter had discontinued its blue control program, known as Twitter Blue, due to “impersonation issues” and began attaching “official” tags to Eli Lilly and other large accounts of corporations.
On Friday evening, Musk posted on Twitter Twitter will start adding a “parody” tag to fake blue check accounts. He also championed Eli Lilly, tweets to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who had used the falsification to draw attention to the high prices of insulin, a life-saving drug — that “the price issue is complex.”
Few of the nation’s most prominent businesses and political figures have escaped viral Twitter impersonations in recent days: former presidents (Donald Trump, George W. Bush) and corporate giants (defense contractor Lockheed MartinMusk’s automaker Tesla) have all been extensively redone, with fake but verified badges attached.
This change has caused some big advertisers to pull out as well. Omnicom Media Group, an advertising firm that represents corporate giants like Apple and McDonald’s, recommended that clients stop all activity on Twitter, saying in a memo first reported by The Verge that “the risk to our clients’ brand safety is increased significantly to a greater level. would be unacceptable.”
For Eli Lilly, the fake $8 bill represented a disastrous and high-profile surprise. The Indianapolis-based conglomerate employs more than 37,000 people in 18 countries and brings in $28 billion in annual revenue.
Sanders and many others used the parody to shine a spotlight on insulin costs, a common point of criticism of the company. When Eli Lilly’s stock price fell 4 percent on Friday — in line with a decline in other health care stocks — many Twitter users praised the fake account: “Tweet just cost Eli Lilly billions ,” said one. I tweet with more than 380,000 likes. “The most important $8 in modern human history,” he said another.
Some Twitter users celebrated the accounts as modern satire or expressed excitement at the idea that Musk’s move could backfire, exposing Twitter to legal threats. Other fake but verified Eli Lilly scams have gone viral, gaining a wide audience before they too were suspended: A posted on Twitter, “Humalog now costs $400. We can do this whenever we want and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
For healthcare companies like Eli Lilly, the change offered not only a reputational threat, but the risk that other counterfeits could threaten people’s well-being. Eli Lilly’s Twitter accounts moderate medical questions and work to correct misinformation about side effects, health issues and long-term care.
Twitter’s change, O’Connor said, has shocked not only Eli Lilly, but many other companies now worried about the risk of participating on a platform where the legitimacy of an account is no longer guaranteed.
“This isn’t just about Twitter, it’s about patient health,” O’Connor said. What if a public health group is “deceived and shares information that makes people’s diabetes worse? Where does it stop? It feels like this is literally just the beginning and it’s only going to get worse.”
