Elon Musk bought the portal for $44 billion.
(Photo: IMAGO/ZUMA Wire)
san francisco Elon Musk’s changes to Twitter two weeks ago have thrown the platform into chaos. Musk introduced a $7.99 subscription service that gave each paying user authentication with a Twitter tick. Fake accounts took advantage of this to publicly harm several large corporations.
Twitter then paused the Twitter Blue subscription service. In the USA it was no longer possible to take out the subscription over the weekend.
Previously, an authenticated account with the name of the US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly had spread the message: “We are pleased to announce that insulin is now free.” The company denied the announcement, but the false message was accessible on Twitter for hours .
Eli Lilly’s share price fell more than four percent on Friday. The company lost more than $13 billion in market capitalization.
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The shares of the insulin producers Novo Nordisk (minus 3.5 percent) and Sanofi (minus 3.4 percent) collapsed on Friday.
A verified account under the name of the armaments company Lockheed Martin spread the false news that the company was stopping all deliveries to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the USA “pending a further investigation into human rights abuses there”. Lockheed Martin also denied the false news, but the company’s share price collapsed by more than five percent on Friday.
The abuse was possible because Musk had designed the Twitter subscription from the start in such a way that a monetary payment is enough to get an authenticated account. The name of an authenticated user was not checked. Previously, Twitter had reviewed each account before awarding the verification mark. In addition, the sign was free before the platform was sold to Elon Musk.
Since then, many fake accounts with the verification badge have been circulating. A fake BP account with the company logo tweeted: “Just because we killed the planet doesn’t mean we can’t miss it.”
A fake Chiquita Food Twitter account wrote: “We apologize to anyone who received a misleading message from a fake Chiquita account. We haven’t overthrown a government since 1954.”
A fake Tesla account mobbed against Elon Musk. Fake accounts of former US President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair joked about the Iraq war. And an account with the name “Jesus” also received the Twitter verification badge.
New Twitter subscription service has 140,000 customers
According to research by the New York Times, the subscription service introduced by Elon Musk is said to have had 140,000 customers on Thursday. Twitter previously had a subscription service, but it didn’t include automatic verification. This service was merged into Elon Musk’s new subscription. According to industry estimates, Twitter’s legacy subscription service already had more than 100,000 paying customers. According to the latest quarterly figures, Twitter had a total of 238 million monthly active users at the end of July.
A number of companies had already paused advertising on Twitter for fear of damage to their reputation. In a memo quoted by the portal “The Verge”, the advertising company Omnicom, which represents companies such as Apple, Pepsico and McDonald’s, warned against reputational damage through Twitter and advised its clients to pause their activities on the platform.
Musk had warned employees of a difficult economic situation. In an e-mail to the workforce, he had set the goal of generating at least 50 percent of sales from subscriptions in the future. So far, advertising has contributed around 90 percent of sales on Twitter.
The pressure on Twitter is great to open up new sources of income. The platform had made a loss for eight of the past ten years. Elon Musk took out a $13 billion loan. The cost of servicing the debt alone is said to amount to a billion dollars. Last year, Twitter lost around $500 million on sales of around $5.1 billion.
There is a great deal of unrest within the company. Musk fired every second Twitter employee after the takeover. Important executives have also recently left the company.
More: Musk warns of existential threat to Twitter – key executives are leaving