No, Twitter Didn’t Just Take $8 Billion Off Eli Lilly’s Stock
These memes are empowering, but also wrong
What a week it’s been for misinformation! Who would have thought that allowing anyone on Twitter to become verified for an $8 monthly payment would be such a disaster?
Turns out, letting joke accounts impersonate real accounts can lead to some unintended consequences. But are those consequences quite as earth-shaking as some memes (and news outlets, too!) are suggesting?
One popular meme, for example, is claiming that a joke tweet from a fake account pretending to be the official account of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Co, declaring insulin to be free, has done huge damage to the company’s stock and “deleted billions of dollars in value.”
Here’s the meme, a composite of the tweet, Eli Lilly’s stock price, and a screenshot of a headline from the Toronto Star:
But is this meme accurate, or is it fake news?
Here’s why you shouldn’t trust everything you read online — even if it’s posted in easy-to-mock meme form.
