Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling

Perceived Dangers and Manipulation Incentives

• Many argue Polymarket and similar platforms are inherently gameable in a hyper‑connected world: if you can influence an outcome (elections, wars, corporate events, outages, refereeing, etc.), you can bet on it and profit.
• Concerns focus on “chaos‑for‑profit”: markets on things like airstrikes, geopolitical moves, or corporate outages give insiders or decision‑makers a direct financial incentive to trigger or shape events.
• Several examples are cited: large BTC shorts before policy announcements, NBA referees fixing games for small sums, a “Cloudflare outage” market, and military or Ukraine‑war misreporting allegedly aligned with bets.

Gambling, Addiction, and Regulation

• Many commenters see these as straight gambling, just rebranded as “prediction markets,” with similar or worse harms than sports betting, Robinhood‑style options, or NFTs.
• The key worry is very low friction and extremely broad bet surfaces (politics, war, weather, press conferences), creating a “gambling addiction nightmare.”
• Unlike regulated sportsbooks, platforms are said not to honor exclusion lists for problem gamblers, and to operate in a regulatory gray zone despite being de facto gambling.

Media, Polls, and Goodhart’s Law

• A central theme: once TV news treats prediction markets like scientific polls or “the pulse of the nation,” they become easier and cheaper to manipulate than public opinion itself.
• Deep‑pocketed actors can move relatively thin markets to generate favorable headlines (“odds surge for X”), even if that doesn’t reflect real sentiment.
• Some argue larger, more liquid markets become harder to manipulate; others counter that the core problem is the feedback loop between markets, media, and behavior.

Prediction Accuracy and Insider Information

• Supporters highlight that prediction markets can beat polls in some elections by aggregating dispersed information and incentivizing accurate beliefs.
• Critics respond that:
  • They work “only until” they become targets; then Goodhart’s Law kicks in.
  • Insiders often “snipe” just before outcomes, so signals arrive too late to be socially useful.
  • Non‑insider participants are effectively subsidizing insiders, much like casinos.

Ethics, Law, and Societal Decay

• Strong moral objections frame this as another stage in widespread financial speculation, social decay, and “all business becoming a game of chance.”
• Chesterton’s Fence is invoked: gambling was heavily constrained for centuries for a reason; dismantling those barriers without understanding why they existed is seen as reckless.
• Debate also touches insider trading doctrine, national‑security risks of visible order flow, and whether these markets differ meaningfully from stock or sports markets.