What Does Mark Zuckerberg Want With Prediction Markets?
Meta’s latest copycat act may not be about getting into gambling. By John Herrman , a tech columnist at Intelligencer Formerly, he was a reporter and critic at the New York Times and co-editor of The Awl. The basic story of Meta is that, after creating Facebook, which grew into one of the largest advertising businesses in the world, Mark Zuckerberg fortified his empire by acquiring fast-growing competitors and ruthlessly cloning the ones he couldn’t get. Of the acquisitions, Instagram and WhatsApp turned out to be enormously successful. The clones were more complicated. There’s Threads, the Twitter clone, which Meta claims is used by 500 million people a month but which seems to exert virtually no influence on the internet or the world around it. And while Instagram was an acquisition, its current form is arguably the result of two cloning attempts: one of Snapchat, in the form of Stories; the other of TikTok, as Reels. Mostly, though, the cloning attempts haven’t gone much of anywhere. Remember Facebook Camera, the pre-acquisition Instagram-alike from 2012? How about Poke, the early Snapchat clone? Or Slingshot, the other Snapchat clone? Paper, the Flipboard knockoff? Lasso, which was sort of like TikTok? Hobbi, which was inspired by Pinterest? Bonfire , which tried to be Houseparty? How about Live Audio Rooms, the Clubhouse rip? This isn’t an exhaustive list, and it’s still expanding, particularly if you include the app-shaped output of the company’s massive, haphazard tagalong AI efforts. As of last month, you can download a Reddit-ish Meta app called Forum. And soon, according to the New York Times , an app that’s kind of like Kalshi and Polymarket: [Zuckerberg] recently dispatched a small team at his company to create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi, two employees with knowledge of the matter said. Users would not wager money, and the app would probably rely on a video-game-like points system instead, one person said, though the company had not ruled out the eventual use of real money betting. It’s not particularly difficult to pick out “prediction” markets as a fast-growing phenomenon in 2026, and in fact, Meta tried something like this back when it was still called Facebook: But it’s worth mentioning another low-profile Meta app here: Viewpoints, which offers users small payments in exchange for user research and can include sharing app-usage data, serves a similar role for the company as Onavo, a VPN app the company acquired in the 2010s and used to track the growth of competitors like Snapchat, eventually drawing antitrust scrutiny and fines. As obvious as the growth of prediction markets is from the outside, Meta likely has access to far more detailed data about how people are using them and decided they too were worth another clone job. Anyway: Most of Meta’s copied and acquired apps exist to capitalize on new trends, capture new markets, or thwart competition. They’re also hedges against broader changes in how people use the internet. Instagram was turned into a place for users to go as Facebook became less vibrant, and its reengineering into a vertical video platform helped retain them through the rise of TikTok. One could interpret Forum, which tries to extend Facebook Groups into an all-purpose community platform, as a hedge against the slopification of Meta’s nominally social apps, which shifted away from human connections in favor of algorithmic video recommendations just in time for the rise of AI-generated content but still account for virtually all of the company’s revenue. Meta’s prediction-market app, which is being developed under the name Arena, is a clear attempt to catch a trend on the way up, but it too can be interpreted as a way to manage a real and mounting risk. For two decades, Facebook, followed by its sister apps, induced millions and then billions of people to post things, mostly for free, in exchange for the promise of connection, then fame, and then, after its platforms became ubiquitous, to assert social existence online. Monetizing all content with targeted ads turned into an enormous business. Over the years, aided in no small part by Meta’s relentless pursuit of TikTok and YouTube, the platforms’ users came to understand them as places to consume endless posts from strangers , rather than to share content of their own. (If you’re not an aspiring influencer or a brand, why bother posting into a feed full of people you don’t know and who don’t know you?) As they’ve moved away from user sharing and de-emphasized links to outside media, which has been collapsing and disappearing behind paywalls anyway, Meta’s platforms have become increasingly self-contained. Even Threads, which was intended to foster some sort of newsy, real-time conversation among users, can feel like a bunch of people floating together in a sparse, discursive metaverse with a fuzzy relationship to the outside world. There are plenty of reasons to believe Meta’s prediction markets will end up in the family-of-apps burial plot next to all the others, not least the apparent plan to launch with some sort of Zuckbucks rather than real money. But on the off chance it catches on, it could solve real, looming issues for Meta. Prediction markets, which have primarily been used as an alternative to sports betting, are nonetheless pretty good at aggregating and describing current events: games, fights, or races, sure, but also elections, geopolitical outcomes, and financial news. Having its own would be useful to Meta as a sort of (grimly attention-driven, thoroughly financialized, speculation-focused) equivalent to a newsroom — a real-time feed of predictions, accompanying takes , and outcomes produced in-house and for free or, better yet, producing a profit. It would also provide a neat solution, in a moment of regulatory lassitude , to the problem of paying creators, which is the increasingly unavoidable and expensive answer to the question of how, after 20 years of coaxing people into producing content for your platform, you get them to keep going. Maybe if you just let them bet against one another, they’ll share with you the most valuable information they think they have.
Source: New York Magazine