Like “combining alcohol and cocaine”: Meta plans to add gambling to its addictive platforms

A view of Meta (Facebook) headquarters in Menlo Park, California, United States on May 15, 2026. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Less than four months after being found liable for building addictive design elements into Instagram, Meta is developing plans to lace its platforms with a novel gambling feature: a prediction market that could feed users an individualized stream of events to bet on.

“By folding in prediction markets to an interface that itself is already a lot like a slot machine,” Meta “could accelerate and fuel” potential harms posed by its social media platforms, said Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist and associate professor at New York University who authored Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas.

“Social media already has variable rewards… where you’re scrolling, pulling to refresh, and each scroll can be seen as pressing a button or pulling a metaphorical lever and seeing what you’re going to get,” Schüll said in an interview with Oligarch Watch.

“To bring literal prediction markets over, it’s just going to compound the gamblification of that interface,” she added.

App-based prediction markets allow users as young as 18 to place binary, yes-or-no bets against each other on the outcome of any number of events — whether France will win the World Cup, which party will control the Senate next year, the outcome of the Iran war, or the winning couple for this season of Love Island.

Meta’s plan, which comes amid a sharp rise in gambling addiction in the US, could expose a significant percentage of the population to this relatively new form of online betting. A Pew survey last year found that 71% of Americans said they use Facebook and 50% said they use Instagram.

The development of Arena, Meta’s unreleased prediction market app, was first revealed last month by the New York Times. Citing sources at the company, the paper reported that the app is a top priority for chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who believes that adding a gambling component could increase user activity on Meta’s platforms.

Any boost in engagement would be a welcome development for the world’s largest social media and surveillance advertising company. Meta, which is seeking new revenue streams amid its loss-making “superintelligence” spending frenzy, said it lost approximately 20 million users globally in the first quarter of 2026, its first publicly reported overall decline. (More than 3.55 billion people worldwide continue to use at least one of the company’s platforms daily.)

Having already honed addictive tap-and-scroll features for its apps, Meta’s next iteration could provide a new level of stimulation by pumping gambling prompts into user feeds, explained Anna Lembke, a professor and medical director of Addiction Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

“Combining two addictive mechanisms together is a tried and true way to overcome tolerance,” she said in an interview with Oligarch Watch.

“People have done this with traditional drugs for forever. Combining alcohol and cocaine to make cocaethylene, which is a more potent drug, combining Xanax and opioids together to make more potent drugs,” Lembke added. “Digital media is unique because it can do this in real time.”

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a bellwether legal case in March, Meta was found liable for harming a young woman by engineering addictive design features into Instagram, including endless content feeds, automatically playing videos, and algorithmically personalized recommendations to increase her screen time. The company, which has sought to overturn the $6 million verdict, faces thousands of similar lawsuits from 29 state attorneys general, school districts, and individuals.

“It’s absurd to see prediction markets as somehow not gambling”

Meta hopes that Arena will eventually draw 100 million users, with a core base of people ages 18 to 34, according to the Times. To meet that goal, the company plans to integrate betting opportunities into its traditional content feed, Reels (short-form video), Stories, and Messenger.

Whether Arena will offer real money transactions remains unclear. The Times reported that Meta executives have sought to differentiate its app from Kalshi and Polymarket, the leading app-based prediction markets, by saying Arena would use a vaguely defined “points” system and incorporate leaderboards or other non-cash rewards. At the same time, Zuckerberg has explored ways for Meta to partner with Kalshi and Polymarket — companies that offer real money wagers and profit by charging a percentage fee on trades. The centibillionaire executive even looked to acquire Kalshi during failed negotiations last year, according to NPR.

Even if Meta forgoes using real money, its prediction market would not be risk-free, argued Lembke, a practicing psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.

What we see with pathological gamblers, that is, people who get addicted to gambling, is that it might start out as wanting to win real money. But once people become addicted, they’re actually addicted not to the money, but to the game itself. That altered state of consciousness, the flow state — as pathological as it may be — that they get into when they’re deep in the game.

At the end of the day, whether it’s real currency or digital currency, it makes absolutely no difference. And in my clinical work, I’ve seen people get as addicted to digital currency as real currency.

There doesn’t seem to be any difference in terms of the phenomenology of addiction in those cases. There are, for example, online slots people can play that don’t cost any money, and it’s all about digital currency. People who become severely clinically addicted to those platforms are experiencing terrible negative consequences. Their earning ability goes down because they’re not going to work, because they’re gambling all day long with digital currency. Plus, as with any addiction, they get progressively more depressed, more anxious, more hopeless, more likely to end their own lives. Pathological gamblers have one of the highest suicide rates, so it’s a very serious problem.

In the eight years since the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting, gambling disorder diagnoses have increased by 61% in states that legalized the practice, according to an Epic Research study released last month.

However, the leading prediction market companies insist that they are not gambling platforms. Kalshi, for instance, describes itself as an “exchange dedicated to trading on the outcome of future events,” even though sports betting accounted for more than 80% of the action it handled over the last year.

The tortured distinction has afforded Kalshi regulatory cover. Traditional gambling companies are regulated by individual states, but futures contracts and other financial derivatives fall under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a small — and, under the Trump administration, permissive and shrinking — federal agency. Helping the industry glide along is Donald Trump Jr., a Kalshi adviser and Polymarket investor.

Because prediction markets use a peer-to-peer betting model, in which users bet against each other rather than the house, Kalshi has sought to sell itself as a fairer alternative to what it calls “predatory sportsbooks.” (Both Kalshi and Polymarket have aggressively targeted college students and face legal disputes with US states that accuse the companies of operating illegal sportsbooks.)

While Schüll said prediction markets differ from other mechanized gambling products — namely, the user experience tends to move more slowly than that of sports betting apps and slot machines — she emphasized that “it’s absurd to see prediction markets as somehow not gambling when sports betting apps are.”

As for Meta, it has embraced “betting” terminology in its vision for Arena. “Betting as Conversation,” read the subheadline of a May post from Ime Archibong, the Meta executive overseeing the Arena project. “Influencers will drive volume, and culture will drive attention,” he added, according to the Times.

“Markets that are so algorithmically tailored to who you are”

By the end of the year, Meta is expected to surpass Alphabet as the dominant digital advertising company, with net advertising revenue projected to exceed $243.4 billion.

The lucrative operation hinges on Meta’s ability to collect vast amounts of data about individuals that can then be packaged and used to sell highly targeted ad placements. The algorithms powering Facebook and Instagram use similar data points to dictate and predict what content a particular user might find most captivating.

In his internal commentary, Archibong, Meta’s VP of product, alluded to the company’s distinct ability to adapt prediction markets for individual users. “When markets are built into a personalized feed, they stop feeling like something for traders. They start to feel like part of the conversation that is tied to memes, moments, and whatever people are paying attention to,” wrote Archibong in a post describing prediction markets as “one of the more interesting new content types.”

That “powerful and/or dangerous” personalization factor, noted Schüll, could differentiate Meta from Kalshi and Polymarket by providing “markets that are so algorithmically tailored to who you are.”

While young men betting on sports drives most app-based gambling, Schüll warned teenage girls could also be susceptible if matched with the right content. “Let’s say you’re going to be given all these options to bet with your friends on Love Island,” she said. “That really could rope this whole other market into this mode of speculation.”

But it is also possible that Arena winds up as another of Zuckerberg’s failed attempts to copy the latest model for capturing online attention.

In her research, Schüll distinguishes between action gambling — think app-based sports betting, where users constantly make decisions on which lines to challenge, which props to stack in a parlay, which bets they should cash out — and escape gambling, a category that includes minimal input machines like slots that allow the user to sink into a trance-like state.

For some users, Meta’s content feeds, particularly its endless churn of short-form videos, provide a similarly static escape experience that may not be an ideal accompaniment for the action offered by prediction markets.

“I do think back to what puzzled me early in my research,” said Schüll, “when gamblers told me how irritated they got by jackpots because they were going along on their flow, their rhythm. And then if they got a jackpot, suddenly the machine would stop, music would play, people would look over at them, they’d have to wait for the hopper to be filled, and it completely ruptured the zone, which they actually cared about more than winning the jackpot.”

She continued: “I see what Meta’s trying to do, and I think their intention is to compound the experience and intensify it. But there is the possibility that it could backfire a little bit, or that it wouldn’t work so well. Because if you’re there, scrolling and scrolling, and you’re just in your zone, maybe the last thing you want to do is depart from that temporality.”