Prediction Markets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Imo the most dystopian thing is that these betting markets can encourage people to do horrible things. Make a bet on a prediction of something horrible happening -> be the one doing that horrible thing.

...Yeah...about that... So about a month ago, a conflict reporter Emanuel Fabian, reported on a missile strike. However because that missile strike was part of a Polymarket $23M wager...the reporter received a massive influx of fury from people, bots and companies because the report could make the bet lose a lot of money. > **[Polymarket gamblers threaten Israeli journalist over missile strike story](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/18/polymarket-gamblers-threaten-israeli-journalist-missile-strike-wager)** - *Emanuel Fabian says his routine report became focus of wager with $23m at stake on online prediction platform* - The Guardian - > An Israeli journalist received threatening messages from users of the online prediction platform Polymarket after one of his reports, on a minor missile strike near Jerusalem, suddenly became the focus of an unresolved bet about the Israel-Iran conflict. > > **“After you make us lose $900,000 we will invest no less than that to finish you,” said one message** to the journalist, Emanuel Fabian. > > **Another said: “You have 90 minutes left to update the lie. If you do this, you will solve the most serious problem you have caused yourself in life … If you decide not to correct it, and leave the lie intact, you will discover enemies who will be willing to pay anything to make your life miserable.”** > > ... > > **The messages started soon after Fabian reported** on a missile striking an open area near Jerusalem on 10 March. “It was a relatively unimportant update during the day,” said Fabian, a defence correspondent for the Times of Israel. > > No one was injured in the strike. Fabian wrote a quick blogpost, including dashboard footage of the explosion that someone had sent him, and then moved on to another story. > > **The first email, later that day, asked him to change the story so that it would describe missile fragments hitting the earth after an interception**, as opposed to a missile. > > Fabian, who had checked the details with the military, declined. **“I was very confused as to why anybody would really care.** It doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, nobody was hurt.” > > **More messages followed, increasingly aggressive. Then Fabian started getting messages on X and realised that the accounts that were writing to him appeared to all be linked to Polymarket users.** > > **He eventually found the specific wager, with more than $23m at stake: whether or not Iran would strike Israel on 10 March. A “strike” had to involve a bomb or a missile, non-intercepted, hitting Israeli soil. The people getting in touch with him stood to win if it was determined that a direct strike had not taken place.** > > “It all balanced on my inconsequential report. **I thought for a second: should I change it and get these people off my back?” Fabian said.** > > **He didn’t. The messages continued. One person wrote to him more than 100 times throughout the night, he said, trying to call him and threatening his family.** So right now if you are a reporter and you report "incorrectly" even in benign terms (the gist of the this bet was the *term* being used) because a Kalshi / Polymarket bet has millions of dollars riding on it, there is now a financial incentive to bully, harass, threaten and even harm said journalist through users, people, bots, emails, physical threats and actual harm. It isn't just that Kalshi and Polymarket incentivize this behavior in the first place, it is that if said betters are successful in bullying a few reporters even to the point of harm (again, there is so much money riding on this now), it only emboldens and escalates more bullying behavior against even more journalists, because there is a strong financial incentive to do so. Given that both companies have a direct line to the White House right now...I shudder to think how much more violent and gruesome efforts to chill speech and journalism would be now that there is an actual *economy* built to enable said chilled speech.

Straight out of South Park

Not even a serious sci fi novel. That's some f****** Fallout satire dystopia level shit.

Feels like the inverse of "Depressed GoFundMe CEO laments the Popularity Contest HealthCarePlan he created"

Alita: Battle angel, early 90's literally had that during the war arc.

It's not dystopian. Prediction markets are an incredibly useful tool. The problem is that these "prediction markets" aren't really that. They're just casinos. Now, casinos do a pretty good job of predicting as well. However, that's not their purpose. Their purpose is to fleece money from people with low impulse control. The way you actually do a prediction market on whether bombs would fall would be to take a bunch of guys working at the DoD and have them wager primarily on *ego*. You might bet $5 but what you're really hoping to win is the esteem of your colleagues for your correct guess. The "Wisdom of Crowds" actually works. However, the mechanism by which it works is not really information but expertise. If your market includes people who already know the outcome, the market is pointless - you just ask the people who already know and ignore the people who don't. Rather, the process involves recognizing that all those experts have a fraction of the picture necessary to understand the future. By properly weighting and aggregating their opinions, the likely truth reinforces itself while the noise averages out. And, yes, this means you 'bet' on horrible events. Because if you've got a tool that permits you to predict - and potentially mitigate - those horrible events it would be morally reprehensible to not use it because it makes you feel icky.

That movie had a deleted scene of them playing Monopoly with real money. Also “Pepto Bismal?”

Klaus Barbie included

They're *eccentric*

This is my best explanation for his "Praise Allah" statement.

Some even speculate Iran also maybe into it as well. Crazy times.

New, unregulated frontier of not-really-random gambling. Combine this with lenient control on markets, and they basically print money, while the masses are busy with ideological war.

You can bring in a lot more money insider trading in other markets than PMs if you had a direct line to the president fwiw. The polymarket etc markets are nowhere close to as liquid as other markets

I kept waiting for someone to just slap the shit out of that little turd

Yeah the character was obviously based on real people, actual you know tech billionaire idiot types

Yeah, and I remember people saying he was unrealistic too 😂

Mine is ReBet, a social and sports c*****… wtf is that? These are cancer, man.

I went down a Plain Bagel rabbit hole one week, he makes great videos

Patrick Boyle (a financial analyst with a wonderfully wry sense of humor) also has a new video out on it. https://youtu.be/e0nsou-1Q2k

My understanding is they are justifying it as a the same thing as the stock market.

They are regulated federally by the CFTC instead of by state gambling comissions

Bot account

It’s really lazy to simply hate on the prediction markets when it’s really the lawmakers allowing this too. I dont the coverage is exactly fair because there are obvious upsides to the technology by the transparency over compared to a sports book Maybe in four years we will have some proper legislation trying to tame it but it won’t happen any time soon. I would be happy if they limited the size or number of contracts a single person could have on the position. They could require KYC to buy a contract and trace it that way.

Yes. People are on their high horse because in response to the govt not enforcing insider trading, they're blaming prediction markets as a whole. Similar stuff is happening with AI, hoping calm minds win out in 2028, but not hopeful.

You understand that “saying it” and doing months of fact checked, lawyer approved, research are two very different things, right?

Is there something wrong with doing an investigative report, as opposed to just talking out of your ass?