🧵 The Irish “hug consent” ad that wasn’t: Polymarket and the business of outrage On Tuesday evening, Polymarket told its million-plus followers on @X: “JUST IN: Irish government releases new ad urging grandparents to ask for consent before hugging their grandchildren.” Within hours it had passed 185,000 views, alongside a chorus of replies about the madness of modern Ireland. Almost every part of it is wrong. The ad comes from We-Consent, a campaign run by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, a charity. Its end card carries the logos of the DRCC, Cuan (the Irish state’s agency on domestic, sexual and gender-based violence) and Community Foundation Ireland. It is state-backed, but the government didn’t make it. It isn’t new either. The ad was posted on the campaign’s YouTube channel about a month ago. Most importantly, it doesn’t urge grandparents to do anything. It’s a 42-second ad aimed at parents, with three short scenes. A little girl asks her dad where babies come from. A mum finds her teenage sons watching a sex scene on TV: “They’ll see it somewhere. Help them make sense of it.” And grandparents arrive at the front door, while the voiceover says: “Not everyone wants a hug, even from the people who love them.” The ad’s message is “Open the door to conversation and learning.” Nobody is told to ask permission. Grandparents aren’t addressed. A month-old ad encouraging parents to talk to their kids was turned into a state order to seek consent before hugging your grandchildren. So who is Polymarket, and why does this keep happening? If you assumed Polymarket was a news outlet, you’re not alone. It isn’t one. Polymarket is a crypto-based betting platform where people wager on real-world events: elections, wars, celebrity gossip, sport. Its X account posts “news” to drive traffic to those bets. Its chief executive calls it “News 2.0”. You can’t legally use it here. UK residents can close existing positions but cannot open new ones, as Polymarket holds no Gambling Commission licence. In February 2026 the Gambling Commission concluded that a UK-facing prediction market is, in most business models, a betting intermediary service under the Gambling Act 2005. The money behind it leads to Trumpworld and Silicon Valley’s right. In August 2025, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture fund, 1789 Capital, invested tens of millions of dollars in Polymarket, which had recently been valued at over $1 billion by Nigel Farage’s “friend” Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Trump Jr. joined its advisory board. The same announcement said the US Department of Justice and the CFTC had closed their investigations into the company, which had included an FBI raid on chief executive Shayne Coplan’s apartment. Polymarket is also X’s official prediction market partner. It is now reportedly raising about $1 billion at a valuation of roughly $21 billion. Its “news” has a documented accuracy problem. In March, a New York Times investigation found Polymarket had published hundreds of false and misleading posts across X, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. Among them: amplifying a far-right claim about Ilhan Omar’s finances, implying Zohran Mamdani was cheating because his name appeared twice on the ballot, and claiming Minnesota’s governor had “declared war” on the federal government. It also falsely attributed a quote to Jeff Bezos, who publicly denied it. The CFTC is reportedly investigating Polymarket over its social media marketing practices. Britain is a recurring target... (Continued...)

Just after midnight on 12 January 2026, Polymarket posted: “JUST IN: The UK has now arrested more than 12,000 people for free speech online.” It has been viewed more than 50 million times. The figure came from a 2025 Times report on 2023 freedom of information data from police forces in England and Wales, so it didn’t even cover the whole UK. It counted arrests under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988: laws covering threatening, menacing, grossly offensive or indecent messages, including harassment, stalking and image-based sexual abuse. Only around 1,100 ended in a conviction. Polymarket turned a two-year-old statistic about online harms into a present-tense claim about mass censorship, two days after Elon Musk shared a graphic built on the same number and asked why the UK government was “so fascist”. When the New York Times investigated Polymarket’s feeds two months later, it picked out this post as one of its headline examples and labelled it misleading. Why Britain? Part of the answer is commercial. The New York Times reported that Polymarket’s social media strategy is designed to attract young men, the group most likely to become paying users. A Columbia Journalism Review investigation found that many of the X accounts Polymarket pays to promote its odds deliver news with a right-wing slant, including Laura Loomer’s. Outrage drives engagement. Polymarket can’t take bets from UK residents, so annoying them costs it nothing. But the bigger answer is political. Britain has become the American right’s favourite cautionary tale. In February 2025, JD Vance used the Munich Security Conference to single out the UK, claiming free speech was in retreat. The US State Department’s annual human rights report then claimed there were credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression in Britain, and attacked the Online Safety Act. There is money in this too. The Act can fine American tech companies, and Trump’s inner circle regards those penalties as foreign interference in American free speech. Reform UK has been a willing supplier of the story. In September 2025, Nigel Farage gave evidence to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in Washington, warning American lawmakers about a decline in free speech in Britain and asking: “At what point did we become North Korea?” Reform’s own relationship with basic facts is hardly better. Full Fact found the figure Zia Yusuf used for the rise in Britain’s foreign-born population far too high. Carbon Brief catalogued 45 false or misleading claims by the party about climate and energy. There are many such examples, with Robert Jenrick in particular posting frequently misleading claims. To be clear: there is no evidence that Polymarket coordinates with Reform, and I’m not suggesting it does. But a Trump-backed betting company, the world’s richest man, the US administration and Britain’s leading populist party are all telling the same story to the same audience. In that story, Britain is a failing, authoritarian state where you can’t speak your mind and the authorities are coming for your grandparents’ hugs. Who benefits? Here I’m arguing rather than reporting. Any politician who wants voters to believe that institutions have failed, that the state is the enemy and that their neighbours are a threat gains from a constant feed of stories that confirm it. It is an old strategy: divide and rule. Turn citizens against the state, communities against each other, and Britain against its allies, and the people promising to tear the system down start to look like the only option. The harms are real. We have already seen what misinformation can do here. After the Southport murders in 2024, false claims that the attacker was an asylum seeker spread rapidly online. A cross-party committee of MPs accepted that misinformation was a driver of the riots that followed, in which more than 300 police officers were injured.

Polymarket played no part in Southport. But the chair of the Commons science and technology committee has warned that it is only a matter of time before misinformation-fuelled riots happen again. Every viral falsehood about Britain adds to the stock of grievance that such moments draw on. The damage doesn’t stop at our borders. Many of those 50 million views will have come from outside Britain. A global audience is being fed a steady picture of a country that bears little resemblance to the real one, and that picture is now repeated by a foreign government in its official reports. Independent measures tell a different story: in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, the UK rose to 18th, while the United States fell seven places to 64th. Few people who scroll past a “JUST IN” post will ever see that ranking. There is also a commercial loop. As one journalism academic told the Times, false posts can move the markets on Polymarket’s own platform, which it then posts about again. He called it “a perverse incentive loop”. Whatever the motive, the effect is the same. A US betting company with close links to the Trump family has become one of the more widely seen sources of “news” about Britain and Ireland on X, and nobody holds it to any journalistic standard. Britain and British people pay the price, in a more divided public at home, and a damaged reputation abroad. Watch the hug ad here: youtu.be/dlkE1ANKg5M?is=WznJ…

On Wednesday morning, Reform UK featured in two stories about breaking the law. In one, unelected shit-stirrer Yusuf announced Reform had reported ITV and its undercover reporters to the police, stating as fact that they “forged a passport” and “almost certainly altered the results” of elections. Nothing has been charged or tested in court. ITV stands by its journalism. In the other, the Electoral Commission confirmed something that has been tested. Reform committed four offences by publishing campaign material without imprints, the rule that tells voters who is trying to influence them. Fined £1,750, it missed the deadline, so the fine rose to £2,187.50. An unproven allegation against journalists is “unprecedented”. A proven breach of election transparency law by the party itself gets no mention. The fine is about 0.003% of the £72m Reform took from two donors in 48 hours this summer.