Mark Zuckerberg thinks Meta isn't doing enough to cater to gambling addicts

This is per reporting this week in The New York Times, which reports that Zuck has been pushing his forces at Meta hard in the production of Arena, a prediction market he hopes to launch into the same space currently addicting dopamine-seekers courtesy of sites like Kalshi and Polymarket. Admittedly, Meta’s version will have one big twist: The current version of the project apparently runs off of meaningless “points,” not actual cash. Which suggests that either a) Zuckerberg doesn’t want to get yelled at/regulated by people who will be angry about him turning Facebook into an actual gambling site, or, b) he’s banking on the fact that people are more addicted to the betting part of prediction markets than the actual “winning money” portion. What’s that? You’d like to hear that last thought rephrased in some real “woof, felt that in the pit of our stomachs” corpo-speech from Facebook’s executives? By all means: “We believe that prediction markets are one of the more interesting new content types. With the right containers, the social conversation is the payoff as people aim to show off how good they are at predicting things to their friends.” You know, like how humans talk!

In fact, the latest reports suggest Zuckerberg has pushed his staff to try to make contacts and partnerships at both Kalshi and Polymarket, who we’re sure are just thrilled at the idea of this lumbering behemoth trying to horn in on their scams. Prediction markets—which claim that they’re just fun analysis tools that simply happen to resemble fuel for an unquenchable, omnidirectional gambling addiction—are facing increased scrutiny from many legislators and state governments at the moment, although the federal government itself has been very slow to say anything even remotely negative about them, a fact that presumably has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that both Kalshi and Polymarket have paid Donald Trump, Jr., to serve as a “strategic advisers” for them over the last two years.