Eli Lilly’s Fake Twitter Account Claims Insulin Is Free, Shares Down 4.37%

This “blue” news comes out on Thursday, so to speak. That day, the Twitter account @EliLillyandCo posted: “We are excited to announce that insulin is now free.” At the time, the account had one of those blue checkmarks next to its name, indicating that Twitter had already verified its authenticity as the real deal, the real Eli Lilly and Company. Giving away free insulin may have sounded like good news to the more than seven million Americans who take insulin regularly every day for diabetes. After all, free is a pretty good price for a drug that has soared over the past decade to over $1,000 a month for some without health insurance.

Well, the whole thing didn’t work out in the end. It turns out that @EliLillyandCo was actually a fake Eli Lilly account. The real Eli Lilly and Company Twitter account, @LillyPad, tried to clear the air later that day because the drug company wasn’t going to give away its product for free:

So how did @EliLillyandCo get the blue check if it wasn’t the real deal? Well, since billionaire Elon Musk closed a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter on October 28, there have been some ch-ch changes. Most of the previous leadership has gone as a bunch of potatoes, meaning they were fired by Musk. He’s also laid off like half of Twitter’s employees because he could. And on Nov. 5, Twitter, fresh under Musk, changed its blue checkmark policy through a service called Twitter Blue. Before you had to prove that you are legally who you say you are, you get a blue check mark next to your name. Twitter’s new blue service instead allowed you or any other person or bot to receive a blue check if you were willing to pay $8 a month. So if you want to claim to be a Hot Dogs professor, PhD, you can use the blue Twitter checkmark to back up your claim, as long as you can dish out $8 a month. The same applies if someone wanted to claim to be you and claim to be blue. Talk about selling legitimacy.

Yeah, write down that Musk-y decision that didn’t think it through or didn’t think it was blue. Soon after Twitter Blue, many fake accounts got blue checkmarks and took their blue to try and wreak havoc. For example, a fake Lockheed Martin account claimed the company stopped selling weapons in certain countries, and a fake LeBron James account claimed the NBA star requested a trade from the Los Angeles Lakers. Also verified by Twitter was an account impersonating former US President George W. Bush with the handle @GeorgeWBushs tweeting “I miss killing Iraqis” along with a sad emoji. Then there was OJ, or rather the fake OJ Simpson account, @ThaReal0J32, who tweeted the confession before being deleted. This fake account used “Thaa” rather than “the” used by the real OJ Simpson account, @TheReal0J32, which by the way has yet to receive Twitter’s blue check mark. In other words, the fake OJ Simpson account got a blue tick before the real account even did.

The handle @EliLillyandCo wasn’t the only account to impersonate Eli Lilly and Company by securing that previously coveted blue checkmark from Twitter. There was another “padded” account, namely @LillyPadCo, who managed to tweet: “Humalog is now $400. We can do this anytime and there’s nothing you can do about it. Suck it up,” according to Pete Syme Insider. The draw was that it’s not that common for drug companies to say “suck it up” unless they’re talking about cough drops. Imagine what would have happened if @EliLillyandCo and @LillyPadCo had been a little more subtle in tweeting disinformation that would show up more in blue.

By the way, the day after Eli Lilly’s fake accounts posted fake insulin tweets, Eli Lilly’s stock fell 4.37%, or $16.08, to $352.30, as blue-ticked creative and political activist Rafael Shimunov noted:

And podcaster Robert Evans, who didn’t have a blue checkmark and therefore either isn’t really Robert Evans or didn’t want to pay $8, tweeted:

Were fake Twitter accounts to blame for the stock price crash? Hard to say. Many things can affect a company’s share price. Heck, GameStop’s stock price spiked in 2021 when people on Reddit and other online forums discovered that hedge funds were making multi-billion dollar short trades against the company. Online investors then began pouring into the company to push GameStop’s stock from about $17 to over $500, presumably to “prevent the stock” from shorting by hedge funds. Regardless, @LillyPad had to issue an “apology” for the fake account’s actions, suggesting that such impersonation left Eli Lilly and Company pretty blue, meaning it wasn’t so happy.

You could say that Musk “blued” it by putting Twitter’s blue confirmation badge on the sale. Charging $8 a month for a blue checkmark probably won’t make much of a dent in Twitter’s debt. At the same time, it was a kind of bleep to everyone who has proven themselves to be the rightful owners of their Twitter accounts over the years. It opened the doors even more to false information and disinformation on Twitter as well. What’s more, it could potentially even prevent billionaires from making even more money:

Wouldn’t Musk want to hurt billionaires?

If you were Eli Lilly or OJ Simpson and you called Twitter last week to ask about Twitter’s verification of fake accounts, it’s not clear who you might have contacted. That’s because Musk apparently destroyed Twitter’s communications department, as writer Molly Knight tweeted:

Hmmm, missing a communications department after a major change to the account verification system isn’t exactly a recipe for success, sad face emoji. Or maybe a poop emoji. It definitely didn’t deserve an eggplant emoji. It’s a bit like eating a plum-flaxseed-bean casserole surprise with coffee without checking that the bathroom is available and stocked with toilet paper.

So no, insulin has not gone the way of restaurant napkins. Eli Lilly and Company does not provide the drug for free. Quite the contrary, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who pointed out that the company has raised the price of insulin by more than 1,200% since 1996:

It may be amazing what $8 can buy you on Twitter, but it probably won’t buy you much insulin.