Bombarding gamblers with offers greatly increases betting and gambling harm

>“Although the findings relate to direct marketing, I see no reason why the same or similar adverse effects wouldn’t occur for gambling advertising on TV or social media.”

Controlling/banning advertising for Alcohol and Tobacco results in significant health benefits. Sports gambling used to be illegal in many places or limited to specific places. Now that it's available in your pocket, like a pack of smokes or a flask of whisky, why wouldn't advertising triggers, direct or otherwise, be effective at encouraging susceptible people to partake? This is not a surprising result. It's the inaction of most governments that is surprising.

Can't wait to see how this (rather unsurprising yet important finding) is going to get abused for and with AI :

"Hey, I see we haven't chat / you didn't vibe code for few days now, how about you get 1000 free tokens and we just see where that lead us?"

It perfectly aligns with sycophantic interaction and then roulette outcome one gets, sure it might not work 100% of the time but it works most of the time and "I" as a user somehow "get it" more than AI researcher so "I" can get it to work for me.

Brilliant.

The legalization and expansion of gambling was a massive mistake and should be undone as soon as possible.

Fun fact: gambling companies increasingly also invest in mental health service companies, so that they can profit from both sides.

That's what they mean when they say the house always wins.

Study seems flawed– it preselects two different audiences (allow/not-allow offers mapping to something like low/high interest in gambling), then attributes the offers as the cause rather than the effect of selecting different audiences.

Crazy how we (the US) just decided as a society that gambling was not only not illegal anymore but that it was perfectly reasonable to integrate it deeply into every sporting event possible in a span of about five years.

We didn't decide that, btw.

I've always found the marketing around gambling (and most things really) completely disgusting. As a society I think we're far too tolerant of these things.

A lot of the ads basically go along the lines of: 'you could win big and have a great time, awesome! (disclaimer: will probably ruin your life)'.

It should be like it is with smoking - photos of lung cancer patients on the package. People will still do it of course but at least it's not falsely advertised.

So the gambling ads should be things like, that moment where your wife finds out you've drained the family's savings and the house is about to be re-possessed. Yeah.

Isn't it the same for tobacco and alcohol ads?

I hate this kind of research. Or well, I hate that it has any influence at all, that it matters.

This kind of research being that which shows an obvious harm that we all know about. It should have zero influence because it is blindingly obvious. Namely because if the title wasn't true, betting companies wouldn't be spending lots of money on it in the first place. But they are, as everyone who lives in the UK can tell. So we know. So this study shouldn't influence policy in the slightest. But it does.

I hate it because there's by definition a gap of years between A. all of us knowing that a phenomenon is harmful B. the study coming out. And then another gap of many years between the study and actual policy changes.

Here's my request to people in academia who do studies like these - which is admittedly a tiny percentage of academia. Just fudge the numbers and publish it a year earlier. Use LLMs to generate the text. It would be a huge boon to society. We all know it's true, so you're not doing anything wrong. Your quest for honesty is hurting everyone. The actual data is pointless.

It's like gathering real data on whether pigeons will indeed eat sunflower seeds if thrown on the ground in front of them, versus just making it up. Maybe such a study hasn't been done yet, but it literally doesn't matter because we know the outcome. There's zero gain from actually doing the study versus saying that yes, pigeons will generally do so.

When online sports gambling started in the US they were offering $500-$1000 of free bets to sign up. Very tempting to sign up, even though I don't gamble anymore than about once a decade, but I decided whoever did that offer was probably smarter than me about who would win out in the end.

I've been around the block long enough to know you never take an 'easy profit' deal from someone who is in the business of making money from them while in their own domain.

I mean if it didn't make the gambling organizations more money they wouldn't do it. Gambling industry has always been about how much wealth it can extract from the punters without being regulated for it.

Hopefully this research ends up being used to justify more gambling regulations, but governments are addicted to the gambling lobby donations so who knows what will happen.

why can't we have a law that just caps your gambling losses? Everyone gets a federally issued gambling license tied to your ID, if you lose more than X amount the casino is no longer legally allowed to let you play. Casual gamblers can still enjoy, problem gamblers get cut off; just like with alcohol at the bar.

Super shocking (sarcasm).

Gamblers are the whales of that industry. The industry is well aware of that and well aware of how much harm they can cause. But their paychecks depend on not knowing so they choose not to.

Same as pay-to-win freemium games. Find the whales and milk them for all you can. For every high-spender who can afford it they know full well the other 99 cannot. They know they are ruining some people's lives. They know they use dirty psychological manipulation tactics. Their paychecks depend on not knowing so they choose not to.

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If it's so bad for gamblers, why don't they stop?

If gambling orgs do something that you know causes harm, why isn't the a legal sense of responsibility?