Forbes Faces Backlash for Adding Prediction Game to Article on Children's Mass Shooting

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, first reported by cryptocurrency journalist and researcher Molly White and shared on Bluesky, involved ForbesPredict, a prediction market-lite feature Forbes integrated into its platform earlier this year. Beneath a section describing the Shreveport gunman, a 31-year-old named Shamar Elkins, a ForbesPredict box appeared. It asked readers to “make your prediction” on “gun policy”, specifically whether they believed “Congress WILL pass new gun safety legislation before 31st December 2026.”

When the question mark next to the feature’s beta-testing warning was clicked, a graphic declared that ForbesPredict is where “readers predict the future — not money.” The box instructed users to “Wager coins (never real money) on what happens next,” adding, “Double down when you’re confident. Flip your call when the story changes.”

Unlike popular prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, ForbesPredict does not accept real money. Instead, it transforms news into a prediction market-adjacent betting game, where readers wager faux coins on real events for rewards. Forbes has stated that using fake money allows ForbesPredict to avoid regulatory burdens, as explained 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.” She explained,

“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. 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 the “gamification” of real news using Monopoly money—and what value that offers readers—remains unclear.

ForbesPredict was created by Axiom, a company described on LinkedIn as “bridging media and prophecy.” Axiom CEO Jeffrey Yam sits on Forbes’ board. In a press release, Yam stated,

“We’re building the prediction layer for media.”

Online condemnation of Forbes’ inclusion of its prediction game in the context of a mass shooting of children was swift and intense. Molly White, who first highlighted the feature, called it “Ghoulish.” Another user described it as “Dystopian.” A third simply wrote, “I hate it here.”

Forbes has not yet responded to requests for comment. During the Digiday interview, Gould acknowledged,

“We don’t know everything about how our audience is going to interact with this. We are open