It has been a topsy-turvy couple of weeks in the Twittersphere. Since the takeover from Elon Musk, the social media giant has gone through some drastic changes, from firing 50% of its workforce to opening blue tick verification to everyone (who wants to pay $8 (£7) a month).
It’s that latter point that has been causing chaos with the stock markets in the last week. The new pay-to-play verification scheme that has been opened up post-takeover has recently seen $20 billion wiped off the market cap of insulin manufacturer Eli Lilly with even more being knocked off the share market caps of Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. All of which can be pinned down to a fake Twitter account.
This raises two questions; will there be changes to how companies are verified? Or will investors start to take less notice of “companies”?
What Happened To Eli Lilly?
In short, a tweet went live around 1:30 p.m. on Thursday from an account claiming to be Eli Lilly. This caused the stock price to plummet and knock almost $20 billion off the market cap.
Eli Lilly’s official account was verified under Twitter’s old rules. The new verification system allows any account to be verified for just $8 per month. The move has spurred numerous fake accounts to crop up, impersonating celebrities, politicians and historical figures.
And in short, there might be more instances of verified fake company pages having a bigger impact thanks to the changes in the policy of Elon Musk’s Twitter.