America's Betting Craze Has Spread to Its News Networks

As a similar minded person in regards to “whatever goes”, the way I square it is drawing the line at persuasion, as well as the “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” games they are playing with enticing kids to gamble via sweepstakes loopholes, lax identity verification, etc.

I don’t care about most vice industries, even ones that have harm and addiction. What I care deeply about is advertising and persuasion. Gambling should be allowed, however bookmakers should never be allowed to initiate contact to entice the behavior. No push notifications, no ads, no TV network, no tv sponsorships. If people want to engage in your vice, they should have to find you.

Also, severe penalties. If a kid somehow gets access to an account, the bookmaker should have to unwind and refund all bets that they can’t definitively prove were made by an adult in addition to paying fines, or something similarly draconian. The burden of proof and responsibility needs to be on the people providing something that is proven dangerous to society. If that means that we can’t have betting apps, that’s fine.

The proven societal harms of the sports gambling boom more than justify this level of regulation.

Whether or not gambling is damaging to society shouldn't be a philosophical or moral debate. And IMO "popular opinion" surveys should carry zero weight.

There are many places where gambling has been fully legal for decades. We should be able to look at data to make conclusions about whether something is good or bad.

(I do, however, wish people would shine a spotlight on scratch off tickets... mainly because the odds are so terrible compared to how they're advertised -- if it weren't state-sponsored, I don't think private companies would be able to get away with running ads for lottery tickets that pay out so incredibly poorly)

It so clearly going to take down professional sports at some point - or make a complete mockery of them.

What regulation would you propose? I'm personally against most regulation as well but more transparency (e.g. showing house favored odds) and advertising restrictions don't seem that harmful.

I think regulating too hard here would result in black markets and gamblers becoming more vulnerable to bad actors.

Via The Economist:

> A survey conducted in 2023 by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the governing body of college sport, found that 60% of college students have gambled on sport.

> I don't even know that anyone was really asking for it

Its generally the case that people didn't ask for it, most of the legalization of gambling in 21st century America was done by state legislatures, not referendums, and there's plenty of evidence that lobbying had a big role in this. However its also true that the public failed to reject it, most of the times it was put to referendum. Most people probably never asked for it, but when they were themselves asked most people took a libertarian position and said let people do as they want, even if it harms their kids by ruining their family finances...

Somehow poker is still banned though, thanks to Chuck Schumer from 2006 (he’s still there).

“Except in Nebraska!” (Sorry I mean Pokerstars New Jersey.)

Like social media, there’s a whole nasty well-funded world of businesses behind it doing everything they can to harm people if it means an extra buck.

A lot of things that are basically ok when one dude with ordinary human liability does it become horrible when corporations enter the mix. IMO it’s not contrary to liberalism to tamp down on the use of corporations for these purposes. They’re creations of the state, after all.

And just to really rub this point in: The U18s social media ban was lobbied for by a traditional media backed group that's pro sport betting

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-b...

May be too late. First, several states allowed casinos because of increased tax revenue. Now the industry has gotten big and the model seems to be (as I saw from some random guy on X): "Let's grind up people's souls and see if money comes out"

It’s too late. I got a behind the scenes view of a company that was heavily into online gambling, lobbying for further gambling legalization… and was just one arm of a larger corporation that ran right wing media organizations and produced & distributed for right wing personalities that you have heard of if you’ve looked into that world much at all (one features in a meme-image that’s been popular for many years, for example). Like, they were coupled closely enough that work for the media side crossed over to the gambling side.

IDK if the left is as tied up in it as the right, but that was about a decade ago and I haven’t had more insight since, but judging from the effects I believe it must have gotten far worse. Those orgs pull in stupid money and that one, at least, was using it to boost both gambling legality and far-right politics generally. That had the ears of a lot of the public, and of a lot of politicians.

Couple that with post-Citizens-United “dark money”… yeah, we’re in a bad place and there’s hardly even any awareness of all this outside some politics-nerd circles.

In how much of the US is sports betting legal so far anyway? I'm pretty sure it's not legal here in California yet.

The sports gambling craze in the uk started after I managed to almost entirely exclude adverts from my life -- the main adverts I see are on the escalators on the tube and tend to be for shows. Even then I try to avoid the tube and walk instead.

I have been in pubs with sky sports on occasionally, and it just looks like wall-to-wall.

When I was a lad the local football team was sponsored by an international company with a large local factory. Manchester United were sponsored by a TV company. People did gambling, it tended to be old men in grubby bookies and fruit machines, middle-aged ladies doing social events like bingo, the grand national, and then along came Mystic Meg saying how someone with hair may be lucky tonight for their £1 weekly stake.

We managed to ban smoking adverts from things like snooker, but the replacement is just as bad, in a different way

Next up - legalized drugs in sports.

This was a plot playing out in the background of the film Rat Race. I seem to recall a scene where foreign businessmen were wagering on how long maids could dangle from curtain rods or something.

Legalized gambling is one of the biggest gifts for criminals. It's basically money launderers gift to heaven. All you have to explain is how you came up with the amount for a winning bet, rather than having to explain how you came up with the winnings plus how much you lost to the house.

Not that I think it should be outlawed. But I think it makes more sense to not make money laundering a crime, and allow criminals to put the money straight in the bank rather than having to do this dance where we pretend it is going to gambling or houses or whatever and meanwhile legally enriching even further a bunch of people who otherwise are generating far less 'value' for society.

> a attempt to further squeeze the middle class.

I think it's both a cause of and a symptom of the middle class disappearing.

Part of the compulsion towards gambling and lotteries is this sense that there's no other viable path upwards from where you are.

If you can't even imagine a reasonable chance of success from starting a small business, finding a better job, going back to school, or some other healthy path towards security and prosperity, then literally rolling the dice starts to seem like the most tangible (if unlikely) path towards wealth.

People gamble when they believe they don't have any better opportunities to spend their meager amount of discretionary income on.

(Of course, there is a separate compulsion towards gambling that is more a direct mental illness like alcoholism. But if you see a large-scale rise in gambling, I think you need to look for societal causes.)

a16z is in the business of making money full stop. This makes them money.

I prefer to gamble on the price of commodities and productive assets. It makes me feel superior to those that bet on a horse.

The November federal indictment, for those unfamiliar or curious: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/media/1417041/dl

Allegedly, per the indictment:

> Overall, between 2023 and 2025, the Bettors won at least $400,000 from the Betting Platforms on pitches thrown by the defendant EMMANUEL CLASE DE LA CRUZ.

I can't find the link now but I read an interesting article recently interviewing athletes. They get so much abuse in their Instagram direct messages ("you messed up my parlay! I'm coming for you!")... I don't mean to sound hysterical but there's going to be some horrible high profile crime one of these days.

This is a new issue for sure, but what trust is left to erode in the first place?

We already are regularly asked to accept mere emotionally motivated opinion as information. Of course its relayed as "fact-based reporting", wrapped in mostly tidy narratives which wear the makeup of a journalistic endeavor. But look at which facts are amplified, suppressed, or omitted; or the adjectives used around the facts or which facts are only ever spoken by the journalists and which facts are allowed to be conveyed directly by the participants. Even the choice of which stories are newsworthy and which aren't plays a role.

Modern journalism is already largely a call to action for adopting a particular worldview rather than an effort to ensure that you have the best information in formulating opinions. The press, the government, and activists already have taken the stand that you are a fool that is better manipulated into "correct thinking" by your betters than left to your own devices.

Given all that, I would contend that most reporting is not there to inform you in the first place: its there to manipulate your emotions on a subject while convincing you that somehow you are now "informed". I would say under those circumstances that any trust that still exists in the media is already misplaced. The betting question is just another avenue exacerbating an already unreliable journalistic landscape.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/904/