Eight children were murdered in a horrific mass shooting in Shreveport, Louisiana over the weekend. Forbes published an article about the violent killings — and, alongside that reporting, included a prediction game widget that encouraged readers to place bets on upcoming gun control regulation.
The incident, which was first caught by cryptocurrency journalist and researcher Molly White and shared to Bluesky, was the result of “ForbesPredict,” a prediction market-lite feature that Forbes integrated into its platform earlier this year.
Underneath a chunk of text describing the Shreveport gunman, a 31-year-old named Shamar Elkins, a ForbesPredict box appears. It implores readers to “make your prediction” on “gun policy,” asking whether they believe “Congress WILL pass new gun safety legislation before 31st December 2026.”
When we clicked the question mark next to the feature’s beta-testing warning, we were greeted with a graphic declaring that ForbesPredict is where “readers predict the future — not money.”
“Wager coins (never real money) on what happens next,” reads the box. “Double down when you’re confident. Flip your call when the story changes.”
Like the disclaimer says, unlike explosively popular prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, ForbesPredict doesn’t take real money. It does, though, transform the news into a prediction market-adjacent betting game, where readers are encouraged to bet faux coins on real news events for rewards. (Using fake money allows ForbesPredict to circumvent regulatory burden, as the company explains in a press release about the feature.)
In a January interview with Digiday, Forbes chief innovation officer Nina Gould described ForbesPredict as the “gamification of following a story.”
“Having a layer of sentiment data from our audience available to us and aligned with our content is actually extremely valuable for us in terms of first-party data, in terms of how we might create different segments from our audiences, how we might sell advertising against our content,” she said in the interview. “You can really look at creating segments about people who feel positively or negatively about a particular topic, a particular company, things like that.”
Why a story about murdered children would be an appropriate venue for “gamification” of real news by way of Monopoly money — and what value that offers readers — is unclear.
ForbesPredict was created by a company called Axiom, which is described on LinkedIn as “bridging media and prophecy.” Axiom CEO Jeffrey Yam sits on Forbes‘ board.
“We’re building the prediction layer for media,” Yam said in a press release that billed ForbesPredict as “A First-Of-Its-Kind Prediction Platform Built For Media.”
Online condemnation of Forbes’ inclusion of its prediction game in the context of a mass shooting of children has been swift and intense.
“Ghoulish,” White wrote in her original post. Another user issued a similarly one-worded admonition of the feature: “Dystopian.”
“I hate it here,” another replier added.
We reached out to Forbes for comment, but didn’t immediately hear back.
“We don’t know everything about how our audience is going to interact with this,” Gould conceded to Digiday. “We are open to learning.”
More on prediction markets and media: Google Says Showing Polymarket Bets on Google News Was a Mistake
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