In the wake of the deadly attack on Venezuela and kidnapping of president Nicolás Maduro by the United States, netizens looking to manufacture support for the strikeshave found a friend in generative AI.
Since the kidnapping, people in the West have been fiercely debating who should control the narrative about the military action. By manyaccounts, those most impacted by the attacks — Venezuelans living and working in Venezuela — are resolutely opposed to the strikes, with thousands mobilizing in numerous Venezuelan cities in protest. (The death toll from the US strikes currently stands at 80 soldiers and civilians, a figure whichwill likely go up as the dust settles.)
Though the attacks are still too recent to get accurate polling data of the country’s sentiments, a November survey found that 86 percent of Venezuelans preferred for Maduro to remain head of state to resolve the country’s economic woes. Only 8 percent favored the far-right opposition party, which has support from US president Donald Trump. Even many Venezuelans who oppose Maduro are also opposed to the United States’ incursion to oust him.
Yet if you ask American Trump supporters, Venezuelans are actually thrilled about the invasion. Their evidence: good ol’ AI slop.
In a post with over five million views on X-formerly-Twitter, the account Wall Street Apes shared a minute-long video of what are supposed to be Venezuelan citizens crying tears of joy over the attacks. Of course, as anyone versed in the visual language of gen AI will quickly notice, the video is a compilation of low-quality AI clips.
“The people cry for their freedom, thanks to the United States for freeing us,” the video’s AI narrator exclaims. “The hero, thank you Donald Trump.”
“I’m so jealous,” a US-run account with nearly 140,000 followers replied under the clip. “I want the same freedom and the same joy for Iran and the Iranian people.”
Shooting back at the mega-viral post, critics warned that the AI slop augurs a frightening new era of misinformation.
“The US empire’s war propaganda is getting much more sophisticated,” wrote geopolitical analyst Ben Norton. “You can bet the US government will use AI to try to justify its many more imperialist wars of aggression.”
Sure enough, plenty more AI generated misinformation has surfaced following the attacks, spread by conservative politicians like Vince Lago, mayor of Coral Gables, Florida. In some cases, AI generated images of Maduro in various US custody centers began to circulate in the hours immediately after his kidnapping — and well before authentic images were released by the Trump administration.
As Mexican political journalist José Luis Granados Ceja observed, the AI slop follows decades of efforts by the US government and media to manufacture consent among the western masses for intervention in the oil-rich South American state.
“In 2002, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was briefly ousted in what came to be called the ‘world’s first media coup’ where the lies said on TV paved the road,” Ceja wrote in response to the AI propaganda. “It shouldn’t be a surprise then that in 2025 new tech and fake AI videos are being used toward similar ends.”
I’m a tech and transit correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes transportation, infrastructure, and the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali issues a chilling warning: from weaponizing victimhood to funding networks backed by Qatar and Turkey, Islamists are waging a war the West refuses to see. pic.twitter.com/BDVZRKj9Et
Trump’s capture of Maduro IS “America first.” Not because we get oil, but because we STARVE China of it. Without Venezuela’s oil (and hopefully soon, Iran’s), it’s game over for China:
No Taiwan invasion. No AI dominance. No BRICS reserve currency.
Over 1,000 patients cared for in the comfort of their own homes by St. Vincent’s University Hospital Virtual Ward
21st October 2025
Members of our dedicated SVUH Virtual Ward team marking an important milestone: 1,000 patients cared for safely at home since the service launched in 2024.
St. Vincent’s University Hospital (SVUH) has cared for over 1,000 patients since the launch of its pioneering Virtual Ward in July 2024, enabling them to be treated in the comfort of their own homes. This equates to 9,600 hospital bed days.
Designed for patients who would otherwise require hospital admission, the Virtual Ward allows people to receive hospital-level monitoring, assessment and treatment in the comfort of their own homes.
At the heart of this innovation is the patient. Each person is supported by a multidisciplinary team of nurses, consultants and administrators who oversee daily 24-hour digital monitoring, regular check-ins and clear escalation pathways if clinical concerns arise. By remaining in their own surroundings, patients avoid hospital-acquired complications, stay active and maintain stronger connections to family life. The result is better recovery, lower stress and greater dignity in care.
“Reaching 1,000 patients is a powerful testament to what Virtual Wards make possible. We are now proving that hospitals can reach into the home, not the other way around,” said Pauline McGrath, CEO of St. Vincent’s University Hospital. “Our patients tell us they feel safer and more connected to their lives while still being closely monitored. Every patient cared for at home represents a hospital bed made available for someone acutely unwell. It benefits patients, families and the wider health system.”
Professor Donal O’Shea, Clinical Director for Medicine/Emergency Medicine at St. Vincent’s University Hospital, said the Virtual Ward is transforming how hospital care is delivered: “The Virtual Ward in St. Vincent’s has been one of the most exciting and innovative developments I have seen and reaching the 1,000th patient is a major landmark. It delivers progressive healthcare in the comfort and safety of your own home. There is a real buzz about the hospital because of it and there are opportunities to develop it even further. Patients can hardly believe it when you suggest it as an option – it genuinely transforms the hospital experience for the better.”
Delivering measurable impact
The Virtual Ward Project at SVUH is part of the HSE’s National Virtual Ward Programme and to date over 1,000 patients have been cared for through the Virtual Ward.
Patients have accumulated 9,600 active care days at home since launch (July 2024–October 2025).
By August 2025, this equated to 3,820 hospital bed days saved.
The service maintains 100% daily patient compliance.
On average, 30 patients are monitored daily across cardiology, respiratory, general medicine and urology pathways.
Why this matters
Ireland’s health service continues to face rising demand, limited inpatient capacity and increasing pressure to provide care outside hospital settings. Virtual Wards offer a scalable and cost-effective solution, freeing capacity for acute, elective and emergency care while maintaining safety and quality.
This also places the patient and their family at the centre of their Healthcare journey.
This approach aligns with the HSE’s National Virtual Ward Programme, which identifies Virtual Wards as a core tool for expanding access, optimising capacity and delivering more integrated care closer to home.
Patients benefit through improved experience and outcomes. Hospitals benefit through more efficient use of resources. The health system benefits through a sustainable model of modern care.
Expanding reach and recognition
A Consultant has been appointed to the Virtual Ward and will take up post in January 2026, strengthening clinical leadership.
A new Urology pathway, the first to extend beyond medical specialties into perioperative care, is now fully operational.
SVUH was shortlisted for the 2025 Public Sector Digital Transformation Awards, recognising its leadership in innovation and digital health.
-Ends-
Notes to editors
St. Vincent’s University Hospital launched its Virtual Ward in July 2024 as one of two national pilot sites.
As of October 2025, 1,018 patients have been onboarded, with 9,600 patient active days and full daily compliance on the monitoring platform.
“Patient active days” represent each 24-hour period of acute care delivered remotely. While not all directly translate into bed days saved, they demonstrate the scale of hospital-level care now being safely delivered outside hospital walls.
The service operates as consultant-governed and nurse-led care, providing acute hospital treatment to patients in their own homes.
Pathways include Cardiology, Respiratory, General Medicine and Urology.
The hospital’s data confirms a cumulative 9,600 hospital bed days saved since inception.
The Rundown: OpenAI just released a new report revealing that over 40M people globally turn to ChatGPT for health information daily, with over 5% of all messages now related to healthcare topics.
The details: Common uses include symptom checking, decoding medical jargon, spotting billing errors, and preparing for doctor visits.70% of health-related chats happen outside normal clinic hours, with around 600K weekly messages coming from rural “hospital deserts.”
Users send 1.6-1.9M health insurance questions weekly, covering plan comparisons, billing disputes, and claim appeals.The report also included policy proposals urging the FDA to create clearer pathways for AI medical devices.
Why it matters: Healthcare is clearly already a massive AI use case — and with wearable integrations, medical breakthroughs, and OAI’s push for clearer FDA pathways, it’s only getting bigger. The policy proposals tucked into the report hint at a future where ChatGPT’s personalized insights may look like a digital doctor.
The Rundown: Amazon just introduced Alexa.com, a new browser-based interface that brings its newly AI-infused Alexa+ assistant to the web — directly challenging rivals like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok in the chatbot space.
The details:
Early Access users can access Alexa+ through any browser for research, writing, and planning tasks, marking a first-time extension beyond devices.Alexa+’s agentic capabilities expand with companies like Expedia, Yelp, Angi, and Square joining Uber and OpenTable for reservations, services, and more. Amazon says engagement has surged since the Alexa+ rollout, with users shopping and cooking with the assistant at 3-5x previous rates.The Alexa mobile app is also getting a chatbot-first redesign, elevating conversational AI as the main feature instead of leaving it buried in menus.
Why it matters: Amazon’s massive investment in Anthropic makes this chatbot push a bit strategically awkward, with the company betting billions on Claude while also trying to position Alexa in a similar space. But with distribution across one of the few actually used AI-integrated devices on the market, Alexa+ definitely sits in a unique position. The
Gilles Lipovetsky: ‘If you want to live better and fall in love, take Prozac, don’t look to philosophy’
The French philosopher takes phenomena such as mass consumption, aesthetics, leisure and the kitsch to examine our world and insists that while his field can play a role in understanding it, taking antidepressants might be more effective in dealing with it than reading Socrates
Philosopher and writer Gilles Lipovetsky photographed in the apartment where he lives in Grenoble, France, on September 16Samuel Aranda
There was a time when the philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky would examine the contents of our homes, rummage through the kitchen drawers, listened to our records, put on our clothes and even examine what we threw away. Everything that had no apparent importance, or at least for the intellectual class of the time, was held up as a mirror. Through fashion, mass consumption, aesthetics and leisure, the philosopher and sociologist drew a precise, entertaining and vibrant portrait of our time. Or, rather, of what he calls hypermodernity, an era marked by aesthetics, consumption and excess. The result? A score of groundbreaking books such as The Age of Emptiness, The Empire of Fashion and Hypermodern Times. This time, however, it is our turn to enter his home.
Lipovetsky opens the door of his penthouse in Grenoble, where he lives surrounded by the Alps. “Look, there’s the Belledonne, the Chartreuse, the Oisans, the Vercors and the Trièves,” he explains, as we walk around the large terrace. On the shelves of the living room, he has stacks of DVDs and books and some apparently useless mementos. The thinker has always managed to turn phenomena that intellectuals despised into valuable devices with which to measure the contemporary.
Lipovetsky not only describes social transformations, he interprets them, assigns them a name and, in doing so, designs tools to dissect them. And he does so, almost always, in that poetic tone that runs through his books, and that elevates them to literature. His latest publication is Le nouvel âge du kitsch: Essai sur la civilisation du «trop» (The New Era of Kitsch: An Essay on the Civilization of Excess, not yet available in English), written together with the film critic Jean Serroy.It is a portrait of the journey taken by what is vulgar and showy to the center of our lives. Kitsch, from this new perspective, ceases to be a cultural defect and becomes a revealing portal to the way we live, consume and think about beauty.
The 80-year-old thinker is in good physical shape. The photographer even goes so far as to convince him to do a topless photo. “Look, I’m not Picasso,” he argues in a successful bid to have that particular shot omitted from the final selection. Today he writes, travels and lectures all over the world.
Question.What role does a philosopher play in today’s society? I get the impression that they are increasingly seen as business consultants or coaches.
Answer.The role they once had has gone. Philosophical thought does not possess the collective and social power that it had in previous centuries. Today artificial intelligence has much more impact than philosophy. But philosophy is still necessary, precisely because it is a different way of thinking from that of experts or consultants. In a world where everyone knows everything, where we are inundated with information, there is a muddle and that’s where philosophy can intervene. What I try to do in a transversal way is a global x-ray to put a degree of order into things.
Q. Do we still need those mind maps in such a fragmented world, where so many things happen at once?
A.Homo sapiens are not satisfied with eating, living and waging war. The spirit has an important role, and we cannot live without a certain number of pillars that talk to us about what we do, what we’re like and the world we live in. Before, these were religious systems; what were considered in the past to be the great ideologies. But today, things are much more chaotic. Philosophy allows us to understand the world we live in. But I don’t think that it’s therapeutic, that it’s better to read Socrates than take Prozac.If you want to live better, fall in love, take Prozac or do whatever you want, but don’t turn to philosophy.
Q. Do you use AI apps?
A. I’m an admirer of artificial intelligence. The results provided by ChatGPT are incredible.
Q. Do you talk to it?
A. Yes, of course. We have exchanges. And it’s very accurate. I am surprised by its reflections, also about me.
Q.Do you think it might think better than you?
A.No, it still makes mistakes. And I don’t believe in that idea of the obsolescence of man.People who use AI are also creative; this technology can be very inspiring. We are the ones who ask, and that is fundamental. It is an assistant, I don’t think it will deprive man of the pre-eminence of his thought. Take war. AI plays a very important role in some operations.But who has unleashed it in Ukraine? It is a deliberate decision by a dictator to invade a neighboring country. Decisions do not come from automatisms; they come from paranoia or human megalomania. We are a long way from that idea in which algorithms take power and eliminate man. I don’t see AI rivaling Plato’s Dialogues, or the Critique of Impure Reason — with what Kant termed genius.
Q. Yes, but with AI there will be just one genius in every 10,000. The others will have been eliminated.
A. That is debatable, it will depend on jobs: education, health. It is not desirable. AI can make novels, movies. Basic creativity. But great artistic or philosophical creativity is not on the agenda. The genius is in those who invent.
Q.You have been analyzing society for 40 years through the lens of consumption and taste. Won’t it be more difficult to draw interesting, original conclusions with the homogenization caused by the algorithm?
A. That’s true, but it’s not something new; it goes hand in hand with the consumer society. Thinkers such as Guy Debord already told us in the seventies that advertising created artificial needs, that it alienated. The algorithm is useful in recommending things, it gets it more or less right, that is true. Studies also show that the consumer does not obey in a servile way, that there is still agency.
Q. But the surprise, the ability to discover other worlds, is lost. If you listen to jazz, you won’t be recommended a punk album.
A.That is why training is essential, educating in that space, in the digital. It is the key to not letting the machine do what it wants. You know, you have to compare, use the information and mix it with your own. That is why we have to educate in that direction, to verify and explore other fields. But AI is a huge evolution that pushes back the limits of Homo sapiens and introduces us to extraordinary adventures. It’s the biggest transformation I’ve ever seen. There is nothing that has had this impact before, not even a great book. Also, do you want surprises?
Q. Yes, of course.
Lipovetsky working at his desk.Samuel Aranda
A. I don’t think things happen because consumption is handed over to the algorithm. What does consumption mean in human existence? Nothing. What difference does it make if you drink Coca-Cola or Pepsi? Or if you listen to Céline Dion or Jennifer Lopez?
Q. It alters part of our identity, no?
A.No, because identity is not consumption, it is only one aspect of our life. At least until AI tells me that I must divorce or change my religion. The predictive power of AI will increasingly guide consumption, but that doesn’t matter. If you watch a western tonight or a comedy, does that change your existence?
Q. It depends on the western.
A.Existence can be found in work, in creation, in our personal emotional lives, in political decisions. Will AI tell a woman if she should have an abortion? That’s the fundamental thing, not whether I go on holiday to Huelva or Barcelona. [René] Descartes says in Discourse on Method that the most basic degree of freedom is to choose between indifferent things. Your well-being does not depend on it. The important thing is to do things that you love in your work, to invent, to create, to live fully with your children — if you have them — to live according to your own political vision, to live in a society where people don’t hate each other too much. And algorithms won’t change that.
Q.Consumption, however, dominates sexual relationships, affective relationships, work… Think about dating apps, job search apps.
A. Sure, but before we were confined to our town looking for a partner and when we found one, we got married and had to put up with them for the rest of our lives. And besides, after the algorithm, comes the truth — the disappointments, the doubts, the human choices begin. Technology should not be demonized. But now the big trend is sobriety.
Q. What do you mean?
A.Not taking planes, consuming organic products, not buying clothes… Greta Thunberg. Great, why not? But even imagining the planet converted into that ethos of rigor and sobriety, we would not solve the problem of nine billion people who will have to be educated, transported, cured. I do not believe that humanity’s wellbeing is in the hands of a supposedly responsible, austere, sober consumer. These are crusades, rhetoric. Look, after the Covid-19 crisis, we all had staycations and rode bikes. But there have never been so many people flying as there are now.
Q. How do you define our time?
A.As two great poles. On the one hand, the dynamics of the techno-capitalist superpower: the conquest of space, AI, robotics, genetic modification. Sciences that pulverize the limits. And on the other, a generalized insecurity across the board. People are gripped by fear – fear of climate change, of the erosion of biodiversity, of war on European territory, of AI in the professional sphere, fear of intimate life, fear of food. There is total vulnerability, precisely at a time when there has never been so much power.
Q. In your latest book, you use kitsch as a symbol of this era of excess.
A. The word first appeared in 1860, used to refer to something small. An industrial reproduction of prestigious products. Furniture, small domestic objects. Something secondary criticized by artists, because it was a poor quality, a cheap copy. It was an overloaded reality to put on show. And it remained that way for a century. But now we have a neo-kitsch, a hyper-kitsch.
Q. An evolution?
A. The consumer society made the cheap conquer all spheres. It is no longer the copy that is at the center. Hyper-kitsch means the throw away culture. It involves a worthless product that today has invaded every aspect of our daily lives. It is no longer an aesthetic form, but a structural one, which organizes the contemporary world. There are shopping malls, Disneylands, cities copied from others, such as Dubai, the epitome of a kitsch city. The size, the excess, the monumental matter.
Q. And politics? Is Trump one of those kitsch snowballs placed on the shelf of global democracy?
A. He is the quintessence of kitsch, in every aspect. Trump Tower, gold, ostentatious luxury. Even his MAGA discourse is kitsch, because according to his definition, it is a beautifying mirror of the world, something that aestheticizes, that deceives. [Milan] Kundera said that kitsch was the denial of shit. All detestable aspects are excluded, a cheesy, ideal world. And that’s what Trump’s take on the United States is. But we see this in totalitarian regimes, in the regimes of autocrats. Or when Putin appears petting dogs, next to children, while massacring Ukraine’s civilian population. Kundera also said that the great ideologies are kitsch, because they place a veil over defects.
Q. Does kitsch hide the truth?
A. Yes, it deceives. But it does so through the religion of the supposedly beautiful, to show a false reality.
Q. You wrote a lot about authenticity in your previous book. What is the difference between authenticity and truth?
A. If a person is authentic, they are true to themselves. You are true because you act according to what you love, and not because religion, your parents, or anyone tells you to. Truth has a broader dimension; it is conforming to external facts. It has nothing to do with personal existence. It is an agreement of judgment regarding the facts.
Q. What place does truth have in a society where lies have become mainstream?
A. Keep to the scientific adventure. Although science is at the service of economic forces, it still serves to better understand the world. The media also has a very important role, and is threatened by social networks, now the main vehicle of information. I am in favor of banning social networks until the age of 15. And in schools, which should not fall prey to the fetishism of the digital and should nurture critical thinking.
Q. There is a very strong current that maintains that the truth is dead, that everyone has their own truth. Trump himself has a social network that claims be in possession of the truth — Truth Social.
A. I believe that truth is not dead. That is an old philosophical proposition. [Friedrich] Nietzsche said in the mid-19th century that there were no facts, only interpretations. But the facts do exist. We can discuss the number of demonstrators, but not the demonstration. And the media has a very important role to play in establishing the facts. That’s not to say they should not be interpreted, especially in a post-religious world like ours. The important thing, however, is that this interpretation does not lead to extreme polarization and that we stop talking to each other.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
In a new interview with The Financial Times, Yann LeCun, one of the so-called godfathers of AI, finally dished on his abrupt exit from Meta in November.
From how he tells it, most of it boils down to his increasingly fraught relationship with CEO Mark Zuckerberg — and his new golden boy, Alexandr Wang, who ended up bossing LeCun around even though he’s nearly four decades younger.
LeCun had been at Zuckerberg’s company for over a decade, where, as chief AI scientist, he had the freedom to carry out all kinds of esoteric AI research without necessarily having to worry about developing a profitable product. LeCun described Meta, then Facebook, as a “tabula rasa with a carte blanche.” “Money was clearly not going to be a problem,” he told the FT.
Then, in November 2022, ChatGPT came out, and the whole world went bananas for AI chatbots. AI chatbots and their human-like capabilities for conversation are powered by large language models, something LeCun helped pioneer with his foundational work on neural networks.When Zuckerberg ordered LeCun develop Meta’s own LLM, he agreed under the condition that Llama would be open source and free.
The Llama models “changed the entire industry,” LeCun said, and were a hit with AI researchers because of their power and open source nature.
The success didn’t last, though; the latest Llama 4 model, released last April, was dead on arrival and reviled as an instantly-outdated flop. LeCun blames the failure on Zuckerberg pressuring LeCun’s unit to accelerate AI development.
“We had a lot of new ideas and really cool stuff that they should implement. But they were just going for things that were essentially safe and proved,” LeCun told the FT. “When you do this, you fall behind.”
The rift, however, goes deeper. LeCun views LLMs as a “dead end” for building even more powerful, “superintelligent” models that rival or surpass human capabilities. An entirely different architecture called “world models” which seek to understand the physical world, not just language, is needed to make the next major leap in the tech.
According to LeCun, Zuckerberg actually liked LeCun’s world model research, but didn’t put his money where his mouth is.Instead, Zuckerberg launched a new LLM-focused Superintelligence Labs last year, separate from LeCun’s lab, and offered several hundred million dollar contracts to attract top talent. All the talent that came in, LeCun complained, have been “completely LLM-pilled.”
Zuckerberg’s marquee new-hire was Alexandr Wang, the founder and former CEO of the AI data annotation startup Scale AI, which provides an essential service for training AI models, but doesn’t build or design them. Zuckerberg poured $14 billion into Scale AI to buy a 49 percent stake and, as part of that deal, Wang left and joined Meta to lead the new Superintelligence Labs. As a consequence, LeCun was forced to start reporting to Wang.
The move raised questions from the get-go, including whether Wang, 29, had the experience and background to build massive AI models, something his company didn’t do. LeCun doesn’t leave us wondering where he stands on Wang’s hiring, calling him “young” and “inexperienced.”
Be that as it may, LeCun, considered to be a godfather of the entire field, was now taking orders from Wang. LeCun seemed cool about this at first when the interviewer brought up the new hierarchy. “The average age of a Facebook engineer at the time was 27,” Lecun told the FT. “I was twice the age of the average engineer.”
But when the interviewer pointed out that the younger generation weren’t telling him what to do until the 29-year-old Wang showed up, LeCun seemingly let his true feelings be known.
“Alex isn’t telling me what to do either,” LeCun sneered. “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”
He’ll be his own boss going forward. LeCun has launched a new world-model-focused startup called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, which is targeting a $3 billion valuation. LeCun will serve as executive chairman, allowing him a similar degree of freedom to pursue research he once enjoyed at Meta, according to the FT.
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
There’s Compelling Evidence That Someone Connected to the Trump Administration Profited Off the Invasion of Venezuela by Placing Large Bets on Polymarket
“Pete Hegseth making some beer money on the side?”
Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi have long garnered a reputation for facilitating cheating and insider trading — allowing an athlete, for instance, to place a bet on a game they could then lose on purpose.
Now there’s compelling evidence that someone with inside information about the Trump administration’s regime change plans in Venezuela used that foreknowledge to profit massively from the conflict.
As spotted by researcher Tyson Brody, an unidentified user bet tens of thousands of dollars on various predictions that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro would be imminently “out” or that the US forces would show up “in Venezuela by” a specified date during the runup to the incursion.
The account “existed for only one week and quickly became the biggest ‘yes’ holder in the Maduro out market,” Brody tweeted.
The evidence of insider trading is compelling, to say the least, given the highly suspicious timing. The account invested over $30,000 less than two days before the United States launched its invasion to kidnap Maduro and his wife and “profited $400,000 in less than 24 hours,” as sports entrepreneur Joe Pompliano calculated in a post on Bluesky.
“Seems pretty suspicious!” he added. “[Secretary of defense] Pete Hegseth making some beer money on the side?” Brody joked.
“Insider trading is not only allowed on prediction markets; it’s encouraged,” Pompliano argued.
Who was behind the Polymarket account remains a mystery. Accounts on markets like Polymarket are anonymous, and payouts are in cryptocurrency, making them hard to track.
As Semafor reported over the weekend, news organizations also had early intel of the US raid on Venezuela, but held off publishing the information so as not to put US troops in danger.
In other words, could it have been an insider at a New York or Washington newsroom who was trying to make a buck — or was it an operative inside the Trump administration?
Prediction markets have long raised concerns over exactly these types of situations. Case in point, one Polymarket user made $1 million in 24 hours in early December after betting on Google’s 2025 Year in Search rankings. Per Forbes, the account had a “near-perfect record of 22 correct predictions out of 23 attempts.”
As The American Prospect points out, critics of the Trump administration have long accused officials of dabbling in similar behavior. The administration has also allowed the prediction market to flourish by dropping enforcement cases in the crypto world and failing to introduce meaningful regulations.
Even Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), which owns the president’s social network, Truth Social, entered the prediction markets business last year, showing a pointed appetite for the space.
“Of course insiders shouldn’t be able to get rich off of policy decisions — but even more concerning is the possibility that people are skewing policy outcomes in order to make their bets pay off,” Demand Progress executive director Sean Vitka told The American Prospect.
One thing’s for sure: while insiders profit, those without that privileged information lose out — and when the bets are on a deadly conflict, innocent people stand to suffer as well.
“And questions related to whether or not, and when, military action might be undertaken are especially vulnerable to such manipulation because the president frequently moves with discretion over the timing and (legally or not) without notice to the public or Congress,” Vitka added.
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
Image source: OpenAI
Image source: Amazon
canisgallicus 