Attention whoever is running the Polymarket and Kalshi accounts on X: Chill out, man.
As it stands, you get things like this over the weekend from Polymarket’s sports account. Heat of the NFL Divisional round and they drop this:
There is real money being made and lost on markets such as the NFL MVP race. But Drake Maye could’ve thrown for 350 yards and four touchdowns and his actual chances of winning the MVP wouldn’t have changed. Heck, he could’ve thrown 350 and four and saved a cat from a tree and co-wrote a Good Will Hunting sequel with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and figured out an inexpensive way to desalinate ocean water for thirsty children the world over and … his actual chances of winning the MVP wouldn’t have changed.
Why? Because the voting is over. It’s already determined who will actually win. We’ll find out the Thursday before the Super Bowl.
So while, sure, you can still trade the outcome, the tweet is wholly mistaken. Stafford could’ve thrown 89 interceptions and it wouldn’t have moved the actual chances of him winning the award.
I would like to say this is the worst of it, the worst case of Kalshi and Polymarket doing silly stuff on social, but alas, it’s not. And it leaves the sports world and questions about NFL MVPs in the dust.
Greenland purchase
Kalshi’s main account waded into the Arctic waters late last week, noting that the United States and Denmark had entered into discussions about the sale of Greenland. This was a “JUST IN” tweet.
Of course, if you saw that, it would seem the sale of Greenland to America was, if not imminent, certainly on the horizon. Apparently, plenty of traders saw it, because at 3 p.m. on Jan. 15, there was a 22.7% chance that “Trump” would buy at least part of Greenland before 2027. The tweet was posted at 4:26 p.m. By 6 p.m, it was 27.9%. Later, it peaked at 33%.
X had to post a note under the tweet, noting the information provided was completely and unequivocally false. What was happening was the two countries had formed a group to discuss security, not a sale. Oops!
For the record, at the time of this writing, the tweet was still available.
Not to be outdone, Polymarket — in a since-deleted tweet — posted this: “BREAKING: Trump has deported so many people from Minnesota they’re projected to lose a Congressional seat after next census.”
To be fair, it does not appear there was a direct market where this bit of intel could be traded, but … it’s also remarkably false. Or at minimum, way short of true.
In 2020, Minnesota almost lost one of its eight congressional seats. The state held onto it by 26 people. So is it possible the current wave of deportations might cost the state a seat in 2030? Well, sure, I guess, but so might COVID deaths from 2021. Or a lower birthrate in 2027. Or because the Knudsenbergstrom family — all of ‘em, from Granny Knudsenbergstrom on down — decided to move to Florida.
Dildo redux
And even the completely batshizz crazy ones have real-world effects.
Remember last summer there was a whole dildo-throwing thing going on at WNBA games? It was a coordinated sex-toy-throwing act built to pump and dump a meme coin (called “Green Dildo Coin,” because we live in mid-21st century America) and Polymarket couldn’t help themselves, posting a tweet about a “no bag policy” being implemented to help curtail flying buzzer beaters.
Of course, this was a tradeable market and of course, the tweet wasn’t true. No change in bag policy.
Then there are the badged and affiliated accounts that create their own set of headaches for the prediction markets, from spreading Nazi propaganda to perpetuating rumors that St. Bonaventure GM Adrian “Woj” Wojnarowski dropped an actual Woj bomb and was thrown out of a game for “berating” officials.
All of these — and I’m sure there are more — are problematic for numerous reasons, but the most obvious ones are … well, pretty obvious.
For starters, these sites pitch themselves as sources of truth.
Just Monday in the New York Times, Tarek Mansour, who co-founded Kalshi in 2018, said that prediction markets are “… the most effective way to aggregate information and the crowd wisdom. People don’t lie when money’s involved. You want to be right about your predictions, so you don’t lose money.”
Well, it’s not so easy to be right about one’s predictions when the prediction site is pumping out lies and misinformation.
Which brings us to two: People are putting money on these markets and virtually all of them are dependent on news, and if someone sees a tweet a split second before someone else, they stand to gain. Or in these cases, almost certainly lose.
Just settle down
So yeah, this isn’t about being humorless or demanding monk-like restraint from prediction markets on X. Joke around. Be weird. That’s fine.
But when you badge accounts, amplify nonsense, slap “JUST IN” on stuff that is flat-out wrong, and move prices in real time, you’re no longer just posting nonsense. You’re having an actual effect.
Misinformation triggers a price spike, the “wisdom of the crowd” reacts to the lie, and the house skates on by while the trader gets fleeced.
Prediction markets want to be the gold standard of objective truth. Cool. Then stop acting like a questionable-at-best tabloid. You can’t claim to aggregate truth while your own marketing arm is manufacturing fiction.
Right now, the credibility market in their social posts is trading at near-zero.
