The Battle Against Fake News: How Prediction Markets Are Changing the Game

If you are too lazy to fact check yourself, create a prediction market to outsource it.

What happens on the battlefield is hard to observe from the distance. Usually no neutral observer is present and both opponents want to spin the news to their advantage. Here is a recent example:

Did you ever retweet? Did you forward a link? Many people filter their news via their social network, their bubble. One click, to share some news, may just be a little decision but it is made by millions all the time. Your friends rely on you as fake news detector. How do you handle that responsibility?

One person decided to ask Manifold. The description contains “This is a rare opportunity to actually gage our collective ability to parse propaganda and news.”

You can see a wild swing initially but quickly it stayed below 25% and then below 10%. Two days later newspapers finally feel confident enough to release fact check articles. Many still argue about truth.

A particularly funny argument when you are used to prediction markets: “We cannot be 100% sure.” I agree. in this case I’m 94% sure though and that is “very sure”. It wasn’t Israel.

I’m very happy that prediction markets exist here. You can read the comments where people discuss blurry pixels and distorted sounds. I could try to check it for myself but I can also be pretty sure the market price gives me a solid simple answer since there are many traders (even more on this mirror market).

Metaculus also created a prediction but one day later.

This incident also highlights a strength of Manifold compared to other websites: Speed. It allows any user to publish such markets with waiting for moderation. Yes, the means ugly discussions sometimes about ambiguous criteria, but in this case it also provided useful information much quicker.

There was a similar effect with the LK-99 superconductor: Manifold was first and gather quite some attention because of that.

With this newsletter I want to explore how we can make better decisions. This is a great example how prediction markets may help with tiny decisions like a retweet. The next time you wonder if some news are fake or not, you know how to outsource the fact checking.

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It seems I struggle with posting in a 7 day rhythm. I hope you don’t mind an additional post. There is too much to write about. I’m even skipping the crazy house speaker voting so far. As a german, such chaos is too alien to me to bet.

Probably until next week, lazy readers! 😊