There’s a 77% chance you’re gonna see more news betting in your news reading

Source: Nieman Lab

Are prediction markets “the best tool we have to fight back against bullshit, clickbait, and propaganda” — or “just a euphemism for online gambling”?

By Laura Hazard Owen @laurahazardowen 

Betting isn’t just for sports anymore.

Polymarket, the cryptocurrency-based prediction market startup that hired Nate Silver as an advisor a couple weeks back, is beefing up its editorial offerings ahead of the 2024 election, Semafor noted last night. Substack users can now embed Polymarket predictions into their posts, and Polymarket has also launched its own newsletter, The Oracle, which promises to “comb through the 1,000+ individual markets on Polymarket to find insights about the news you might have missed. It will look at how the political judgment of pundits and experts stacks up to the wisdom of traders from all around the world.”

Comments on the Substack announcement are, so far, overwhelmingly negative: “This feature risks transforming authentic opinions into market-driven narratives, potentially compromising the integrity that makes Substack valuable,” one user claimed. Another: “Isn’t prediction markets just a euphemism for online gambling?” Another: “This is supposed to be a site supporting writers, not market speculators, gamblers, false prophets and snake-oil salespersons.”

Polymarket claims, though, that news prediction is actually a misinformation fighter: “Prediction markets are the best tool we have to fight back against bullshit, clickbait, and propaganda,” the company wrote in the first issue of its Substack newsletter. “They work by rewarding participants who make good predictions, and punishing those who don’t.”

Within Nieman Lab, opinions on the usefulness of Polymarket news predictions vary. For my part: I lean pro! I have no plans to put money on the news myself (and I’m conflicted on whether newsrooms should let journalists do that, at least for the topics they directly cover), but I find it useful to check in and see where consensus is settling — on the question, for instance, of who will be the Democratic VP nominee. I’m also intrigued by the barebones format of prediction with punditry entirely stripped out, and I like scrolling Polymarket for news-about-news–related predictions (like the one illustrating this post, predicting there’s a 66% chance that OpenAI reaches a settlement with The New York Times, which is suing it, by the end of this year).

Neel, though, feels differently: “I’m on the anti-side myself. Polymarket seems to essentially be an avenue for people who are either extremely online or extremely into gambling to bet on the outcomes of news events, and I’m not sure that really gives us any particularly useful information of the type we’re used to with polls. Then again, we’ve learned that polls are kind of broken too.”

As for the “77% chance” in the headline of this post, I made that up, but…I think it’s a safe bet.

Chart from Polymarket