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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

An additional complication is that both Iran and Israel are engaging in heavy censorship of news articles, obstensively to prevent the opposing side from getting intelligence/feedback on their missile strikes/other activities, but it is also definitely to control the narrative:

https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/

This could definitely affect key polymarket bets in the near term. I expect over the long term the truth will come out, but in the near term, it could be obscured.

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I'm not much of a gambler, but I bet on an MMA match once when I was in Vegas. I was informed that the payouts (or lack thereof) were determined by whatever the judges stated at the end of the night, even if the call was controversial and later invalidated. So this sort of thing does affect other forms of gambling, although obviously on a less significant scale.

Interesting. What would happen if it was found later that the match was thrown on purpose by either the judges or the fighters?

This sort of suggests that the best trading strategy would be if you had a guy inside of the censorship bureau who could help you define reality as you want it.

>Interesting. What would happen if it was found later that the match was thrown on purpose by either the judges or the fighters?

This was over a decade ago so I don't remember the exact details, but I'm sure this was covered by the wording of the agreement and I'd have been out of luck with the bookies.

Can't comment on unrelated legal penalties, but in Japan there was match fixing in sumo and nobody got arrested (couldn't prove gambling) but a lot were fired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match-fixing_in_professional_s... https://factsanddetails.com/japan/cat21/sub138/item1779.html

Unfortunately, combat sports are relatively easy to fix because you only have a few people involved in the live action at a time.

>This sort of suggests that the best trading strategy would be if you had a guy inside of the censorship bureau who could help you define reality as you want it.

As far as I can tell, it seems like the betting market sites explicitly encourage insider activities, and I would not be surprised if this happened for real. See:

https://www.rawstory.com/leavitt/

>Gamblers cry foul after White House briefing ends seconds before key betting cutoff

A slightly different example because if true, the insider would be changing her behavior rather than changing the reporting of the facts. But it still shows that a small number of insiders (or a single insider) can change betting results.

Happening to the NBA gambling leagues now with both players and referees.

The effect of this is that those markets should dry up as the information quality is so poor. So bad that even insiders are taking risk by betting on an outcome.

Unlike the regular markets though, which are dominated by smart money, these markets are dominated by degen gamblers and idiots, so I guess they just shrug it off.

What censorship does Israel do?

Israel does military censorship, same as any other country, you can't communicate information that would harm the defense of the country or aid its enemies. Israel is in a hostile and armed neighborhood with frequent hot conflicts, both regular military and irregular forces, so the issue is fairly everpresent compared to other Western style democracies such as in Europe where their neighbors are peaceful.

The EU does quite a lot of military and non-military censorship as well, such as banning RT and its ilk.

I guess for a start they won't let me view this article with a VPN on.

Check the article linked in that comment.

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