{"id":614335,"date":"2026-02-20T20:06:48","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T20:06:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/614335\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T20:06:48","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T20:06:48","slug":"prediction-markets-are-fake-news-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/614335\/","title":{"rendered":"Prediction markets are fake news machines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trade rumors are not new or unique to the NBA<\/a>. In fact, the MLB<\/a> trade deadline is over 100 years old. What is new is online\u00a0betting<\/a>\u00a0markets that allow gamblers to bet on whether those trade rumors are true, and players who can start those rumors, all while taking an ownership stake in the online gambling platform.<\/p>\n

This past January, days before the NBA\u2019s Feb. 5 trade deadline, ESPN reported<\/a> that Milwaukee Bucks power forward Giannis Antetokounmpo, a two-time NBA MVP of the year, was considering leaving Milwaukee for either the Golden State Warriors, Miami Heat, Minnesota Timberwolves, or New York Knicks. The Bucks did win an NBA title in 2021, but have a losing record this season. Antetokounmpo is 31 years old and at the end of his contract, making his long-term future with the Bucks uncertain.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the report went live, the prediction market platform Kalshi began posting on the social media platform X, promoting contracts on Kalshi related to Antetokounmpo\u2019s possible trade out of Milwaukee. An estimated $23 million was wagered<\/a> on whether or not the former MVP would stay. Then on Feb. 6, the day after the deadline, Antetokounmpo posted<\/a> on X, \u201cEveryone is online. The internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own. Today, I\u2019m joining Kalshi as a shareholder. We all on Kalshi now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kalshi quickly followed up with a statement assuring everyone that \u201cAntetokounmpo will be forbidden from trading on markets related to the NBA.\u201d But what about reporters? Or family? Or friends? Whether or not Antetokounmpo planted the initial ESPN rumor or not, he didn\u2019t deny it. Instead, he let Kalshi promote the rumor and profit from it. All while he knew the report was completely false. How many people did he share this knowledge with?<\/p>\n

The creation of fake sports trade rumors is not the extent of prediction market fakery. In November of just last year, Kalshi rival Polymarket had a contract on whether the Ukrainian town of Myrnohrad would fall to Russian forces on a certain day. If the town fell, some gamblers stood to turn a 33,000% profit. And despite Russia<\/a> making no real progress in taking the town, Polymarket paid out on the bet because the map it used to keep track of the war, a map maintained by the Washington<\/a>-based think tank Institute for the Study of War, showed Russian soldiers in control of the territory.<\/p>\n

The next day, after the contract had cleared, ISW quietly restored the map, giving control of Myrnohrad back to Ukraine<\/a>. ISW then released the following statement<\/a>: \u201cIt has come to ISW\u2019s attention that an unauthorized and unapproved edit to the interactive map of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine was made on the night of November 15-16 EST. The unauthorized edit was removed before the day\u2019s normal workflow began on November 16 and did not affect ISW mapping on that or any subsequent day.\u201d The name of an ISW staffer tasked with updating the maps was removed from ISW\u2019s website the day after that. As of publication, Myrnohrad is still in Ukrainian hands, no thanks to Polymarket.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion<\/a>,\u201d Kalshi\u2019s founder, Tarek Mansour, has said. \u201cThey do a very good job of surfacing information and distilling truth to people\u2026 They are the quintessential truth machines.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Truth machines? Really?<\/p>\n

CONN CARROLL: AGAINST THE VICE ECONOMY<\/a><\/p>\n

Prediction markets are just the latest and possibly most destructive example of the financialization of the U.S. economy. Instead of actually investing in factories that build things, Wall Street now makes trillions basically gambling on which direction interest rates, currency values, and commodity prices might go.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this sense, Kalshi is democratizing the financialization of everything. Problem is: Unlike Wall Street, when some 25-year-old in Kansas goes bankrupt gambling on the price of Pokemon cards<\/a>, the federal government won\u2019t bail him out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trade rumors are not new or unique to the NBA. In fact, the MLB trade deadline is over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3775],"tags":[7,103,130,712,71505,102,121,3871,1203,6,81374,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-614335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-milwaukee-bucks","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-bucks","10":"tag-espn","11":"tag-gambling","12":"tag-magazine-your-land","13":"tag-milwaukee","14":"tag-milwaukee-bucks","15":"tag-milwaukeebucks","16":"tag-mlb","17":"tag-nba","18":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","19":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116104766676179832","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}