Shares of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly fell on Wall Street on Friday after the company was the victim of a joke on Twitter, in which a user with the blue verified account mark posed as her to announce that insulin was going to be free
At the end of the trading session, Eli Lilly shares fell more than 4%, a fall that many analysts attributed to the episode experienced in the social network.
Its fall, however, occurred in a general bad day for the health sector, which was the one that fell the most on Wall Street.
Three companies in this field, for example, were at the bottom of the thirty values that make up the Dow Jones Industrials, the main indicator of the New York stock market: UnitedHealth lost 4.06%, MSD 3.86% and Johnson & Johnson 2.99%.
Eli Lilly has been just one of many companies that these days have seen how Twitter users impersonate them, generally to make jokes, taking advantage of the new payment verification system promoted by the new owner of the social network, Elon Musk .
In his case, the message declaring that insulin -one of its main products- became free, spread like wildfire and forced the company to clarify that it was not true.
The episode perfectly illustrated the problems generated by this new reality on Twitter, which gives the blue verified user symbol to anyone who pays an $8 monthly subscription, without any control over their identity.
This Friday, in a new lurch, Twitter stopped access to this service and recovered the “official” mark to distinguish some accounts from possible impostors.
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That gray mark, which had been launched this week to distinguish companies, governments or personalities, had been canceled shortly after by direct order from Musk.
Now, apparently, only advertisers on the social network are receiving this badge, which seeks to combat the problem of “spoofing” identities, according to the company itself.