this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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THAT is what they increasingly see as a bad thing for society?
The hell?
Look, don't take this the wrong way, but what Americans think is increasingly not a good guide to take any sort of action in the first place.
That said, I actually salute the real majority of people in the survey that were assaulted with this question and went "the hell are you talking about, get out of my face". Because yes, the results say 43% responded "bad thing for society", 7% said "good, actually", and 50% said "get out of my face" and are the normal ones.
Let this be a lesson not about sports gambling, but about how bad surveys, misleading headlines and moral panics can be used to manipulate large groups of people.
And to be clear, my stance on US sports betting is: get out of my face. I'm more than happy to talk about how the modern online betting industry uses inadequate regulation to bypass pre-existing rules and how this is another vector of the concerns about online regulation of server-side services and their interactions with privacy and censorship.
But "is it a good thing for society" is going in the "get out of my face" column.
Am I understanding your comment correctly?:
-You are upset that Pew Research, probably the most well-known public opinion polling company in the world, did a public opinion poll on sports betting.
-You are upset that the questions were multiple choice and not in essay format.
-You think people who refuse to answer public opinion polls are better than those who do.
-You agree that the modern online betting industry (commonly known as "sports betting" to avoid "gambling" laws) is a bad thing
Not really, no. I am upset at the type of binary framing you are deploying here being present even in well established research institutions to push specific viewpoints.
Like, say, having a study series that in 2022 reports a 57% neutral answer headline that result as "few people think sports betting is good" and following that up several years later with a 50% neutral answer as "Americans increasingly see sports betting as a bad thing". That's what you call framing, it's not supposed to be there, and it may not annoy me much, because this subject is irrelevant, but it does annoy me.
I also take some issue with the wording of the question, if you must know, which is "Thinking about the fact that betting on sports is now legal in much of the country, do you think this is generally...". I would question why they needed to remind people that this comes from a regulatory change if they weren't going to report it that way, especially since it forces them to keep the same framing in 2025 when they follow up.
But hey, that's nitpicking. So is the whole thing. But it's still a bad headline and a bad way to frame the results. And arguing from authority isn't going to change that. I'm not particularly impressed or reverent when it comes to Ipsos or Pew's methodology for these, they aren't that complicated.
Right, and pro sports influences kids, and gambling makes the pro leagues dirty as hell. So you can think it's irrelevant, but it still influences your community.