In an effort to get in on the massive amount of cash changing hands on Kalshi and Polymarket, Meta is allegedly working on a predictions market app, according to a report from the New York Times. The app, dubbed “Arena,” would allow users across the company’s network of social apps—including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—to place bets on anything and everything.
It’s another example of Mark Zuckerberg’s company flipping to its favorite page in the playbook—but not the one you think. Arena is unmistakably another case of Meta copying a successful app and hoping its knockoff catches on—joining Lasso, Hobbi, Bulletin, and plenty of other forgotten clones. But more than that, it’s Meta assuming the worst of people, which has been arguably its most profitable business proposition.
You can track that back to the company’s origins. While things may not have played out exactly as depicted in The Social Network, Zuckerberg’s proto-Facebook started with a privacy violation that people ignored because they let their horniness get the best of them. The notorious Facemash used ID photos scraped from Harvard’s student websites and fundamentally pitted people against each other, asking visitors to vote on who is the hottest. The site received criticism from the moment it became popular, but it did get very popular, racking up tens of thousands of engagements in a short period. To be clear, getting tens of thousands of engagements was like the Super Bowl of the internet in 2003.
When Zuck did eventually start “The Facebook” proper, his opinion of people clearly hadn’t changed. After launching the website on the Harvard campus and requiring people to provide a school email to get in, Zuck found himself sitting on a trove of personal information about the student body. In a now-notorious series of texts to a friend, Zuck said that he had “over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses” of people from Harvard. When asked how he got that information, he replied, “I don’t know…they ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.” He’d soon expand to other colleges and eventually amass more than three billion active users on the platform today.
As Facebook grew, Zuck continued to lean into the idea that he could maximize interest and profit by letting people lean into their worst impulses. Frances Haugen, a whistleblower who spent two years at Facebook, said the company juiced its algorithm to encourage engagement, knowing full well that negative interactions generate more attention. When the company expanded its reactions on posts, it implemented a weighting system to determine what content gets promoted, giving one “point” for a “like” and five points for an angry emoji.
Meta has repeatedly leaned into engagement-first design at the expense of its users. Earlier this year, the company was found liable for damage done to minors who use platforms like Instagram after a court agreed with the argument that the apps are designed to be addictive. Zuckerberg has denied such accusations, but the company has undeniably researched how to keep people on its platforms for as long as possible—including running experiments on unwitting users to see how they respond to different inputs. Former Facebook employees have claimed the platform is built to provide a “dopamine hit” at the expense of their overall mental health.
Given that, it’s only right that Meta gets into the business of betting and gambling, the current plague that is destroying the futures of young people who mostly lose but find themselves addicted to the rush and increasingly desperate for ways to make money. After all, why should others get to cash in on addictions and destructive behaviors when that’s been Meta’s bread and butter since day one?
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