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By Sharon Zhang / Truthout
Betting company Polymarket and online writing platform Substack announced a partnership this week to further entrench gambling in the world of journalism and, in Polymarket’s words, make journalism “better” with “live markets.”
Substack will now allow writers to embed prediction market data in their articles, with “native tools that make it easier to share, discuss, and debate prediction market data directly on Substack,” as the company’s co-founder and CEO Chris Best said in a post on the platform. Best said a pilot program the company has run since 2024 has led to one in five of Substack’s 250 highest-revenue publications embedding the data.
“Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets,” Polymarket disturbingly wrote in a post on X announcing the partnership.
The post immediately sparked backlash, with journalists questioning the meaning of Polymarket’s post, and others expressing open disdain for the legitimization of prediction markets as part of journalism.
Prediction markets like those hosted on the Peter Thiel-backed Polymarket give users a platform to gamble on real-life events. These can range from outlandish occurrences — like whether Jesus Christ will come back to life by the end of next year — to very serious predictions, like bets on war, that blur legal limits as well as moral ones.
Last year, the prediction market Kalshi sparked outrage after it allowed users to wager on whether a famine would be declared in Gaza.
If these markets are taken as news, there is a danger that they could sway future events, especially if bettors are well-connected. The platform and others like Kalshi have a major problem with insider trading; last month, for instance, one user made $400,000 on a suspiciously well-placed bet on the U.S.’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, sparking concerns that that person had exclusive knowledge of the operation before it happened.
CNN has also recently come under fire for its partnership with Kalshi, which was announced in December. Kalshi and journalists for CNN have portrayed the markets, including on subjects like elections, as news, suggesting that the markets “know” things that haven’t been reported.
Like AI chatbots, prediction markets do not “know” things — and have little to nothing to do with journalism. The markets simply act as a platform for users to speculate in ways outside of sports betting or the stock market, and, insidiously, take financialization of American life to the next level, making anything and everything into a game to bet on.
Still, Best suggested that journalists and other writers on Substack could cite “public odds” on events to predict whether they’ll happen.
“A lot of people focus on the trading part of prediction markets, but the transformative change is having clear, public odds on the future events that people care about,” Best said in a post on X.
Polymarket said it was an opportunity for the company to turn more people into gamblers, as well as to “understand how the best forecasters think, and inject their ideas into the global news slipstream.”
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Sharon Zhang
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter: @zhang_sharon.