Polymarket has gamified pain and suffering with L.A. fire betting
The fires spreading across Los Angeles County have led to so many questions from well-meaning people who are just trying to find information.
Will the fire reach Malibu? Or Santa Monica? Will officials contain the blaze in the coming days? How many acres will burn in total?
These are very real, existential questions for Angelenos and their loved ones. The type of questions you ask when your home, livelihood and safety are at stake.
Unless you’re Polymarket. In which case these aren’t just worrying thoughts. They’re an opportunity to entice users to gamble.
Yep. The event-based trading platform that exploded in popularity during the 2024 election is now letting users bet on just how bad the wildfires in California will get, gamifying the pain and suffering of living, breathing human beings.
This is what rock bottom is supposed to look like. Sadly, it feels like things will continue to get worse before any type of regulation arrives to make it better.
Lest you think any form of public shaming will lead platform to take down these disgusting markets, the company has instead dug in.
In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, a Polymarket spokesman said: “These markets address the same questions being discussed across cable news and X. We’ve proven that prediction markets can be an invaluable alternative information source for those seeking real-time quantitative data.”
It echoes a similar statement provided to Katie Notopoulos of Business Insider:
“Polymarket charges no fees — and generates no revenue — from these markets and provides them as a service to those looking for unbiased and up-to-date information during fast-moving events.”
As if waiving its usual transaction fees makes this any less abhorrent.
What Polymarket has proven with these statements is that just because you are able to string enough words together to complete a sentence, doesn’t mean you’ve actually said anything. It knows there is a vast difference between checking the news for life-saving information and searching betting markets on the same catastrophe. It simply does not care.
If they did, you wouldn’t be able to bet on a single wildfire outcome, let alone the more than a dozen currently available.
Instead, each market contains a notice at the top alerting users that Polymarket will not be collecting any fees on those who bet on the fire outcomes. How chivalrous.
“The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events impacting society,” Polymarket states at the top of each wildfire market. “The devastating Pacific Palisades fire is one such event, for which Polymarket can yield invaluable real-time answers to those directly impacted in ways traditional media cannot.”
Of course, this is utter crap. Look no further than the comments section of these market pages to see loads of conspiracy theories, misinformation and outright lies about what is happening on the ground, some of which are made in obvious attempts to fool bettors into placing their money on the wrong outcome.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times‘ Bill Shaikin, Nathanael Fast, the director of the USC Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making, laid out the immediate and obvious problems with offering markets like “will the fire reach Santa Monica?”
“It could create the incentive to influence events or, in the case of wildfires, it could lead to a callous attitude toward others’ suffering,” Fast said. “If we are gamifying life-and-death issues, it could really negatively influence culture and society in a way we don’t like.”
Well, that’s certainly one way Polymarket directly impacts events in ways traditional media cannot. However you feel about sports and awards betting, this is something far more sinister.
Polymarket knows this, but is likely operating under the premise that all publicity is good publicity. So while Los Angeles burns, it’ll keep taking bets. Because it’s only rock bottom if you stop digging.