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Brett Kavanaugh rides to the Biden administration’s defense in a big First Amendment case
President Joe Biden greets Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh before delivering the State of the Union address on February 7, 2023, in Washington, DC. | Jacquelyn Martin/Getty Images The Supreme Court’s center right appears increasingly frustrated with the judiciary’s far right. There are several recent signs that the federal judiciary’s center right is losing patience with its far right. Last week, a policymaking body within the judiciary announced new steps to combat “judge shopping,” a practice that has allowed Republican litigants to choose to have their cases heard by partisan judges who are well to the right of even the median Trump appointee. The Supreme Court has also heard several cases in its current term where it appears likely to reverse rulings made by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a MAGA stronghold that frequently hands down decisions that appear designed to sabotage the Biden administration. On Monday, the Supreme Court held oral arguments in one of these Fifth Circuit cases, known as Murthy v. Missouri, where the lower court handed down a sweeping injunction forbidding much of the federal government from having any communications at all with social media companies. A majority of the justices appeared very unlikely to sustain that injunction on Monday, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly noting that the Fifth Circuit’s approach would prevent the most routine interactions between government officials and the media. Murthy was one of two cases heard by the justices on Monday involving so-called “jawboning” — cases where the government tried to pressure private companies into taking certain actions, without necessarily using its coercive power to do so. The other case, known as National Rifle Association v. Vullo, involves a fairly egregious violation of the First Amendment. Based on Monday’s argument, as many as all nine of the justices may side with the NRA in that case. (You can read our coverage of the NRA case here.) Most of the justices, in other words, appeared eager to resolve both cases without significantly altering their Court’s First Amendment doctrines, and without disrupting the government’s ability to function. That’s good news for the NRA, but also good news for the Biden administration. So what is the Murthy case about? The general rule in First Amendment cases is that the federal government may not coerce a media company into changing which content it publishes, but it can ask a platform or outlet to remove or alter its content. Indeed, as Kavanaugh pointed out a few times during the oral argument, if the government were not allowed to do so, White House press aides and the like wouldn’t be allowed to speak to reporters to try to shape their coverage. In Murthy, various officials throughout the federal government had many communications with major social media platforms, where the officials either asked the platforms to remove certain content or provided them with information that convinced the platforms to do so. These communications concerned many topics. The FBI, for example, frequently contacts social media platforms to warn them about criminal or terroristic activity that is occurring online. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) flags social media content for the platforms that contains election-related disinformation, such as false statements about when an election will take place. The White House sometimes asks social media companies to remove accounts that falsely impersonate a member of the president’s family. Many of these communications also involved government requests that the platforms pull down information that contains false and harmful health information, including misinformation about Covid-19. And these communications were center stage during the Murthy oral argument — the Murthy plaintiffs include several individuals who are upset that their content was removed because the platforms determined that it was Covid misinformation. These plaintiffs were able to identify several examples where government officials were curt, bossy, or otherwise rude to representatives from the social media companies when those companies refused to pull down content that the government asked them to remove. Notably, however, neither these plaintiffs nor the Fifth Circuit identified a single example where a government official threatened some kind of consequence if a platform did not comply with the government’s requests. Instead, the Fifth Circuit appeared to complain about the fact that the government has so many communications with social media companies. It claimed that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment because government officials “entangled themselves in the platforms’ decision-making processes,” and ordered the government to stop having “consistent and consequential” communications with social media platforms. It’s unclear what that decision even means — how many times, exactly, may the government talk to a social media company before it violates the Fifth Circuit’s order? — and at least six of the justices appeared frustrated by the Fifth Circuit’s ham-handed approach to this case. The two justices who’ve worked in senior White House jobs appeared especially dismissive of the Fifth Circuit’s position Justices Elena Kagan and Kavanaugh seemed especially frustrated with the Fifth Circuit’s attempt to shut down communication between the government and the platforms, and for the same reason. Both Kagan and Kavanaugh worked in high-level White House jobs — Kagan as deputy domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, and Kavanaugh as staff secretary to President George W. Bush — and both recoiled at the suggestion that the White House can’t try to persuade the media to change what it publishes. Indeed, Kavanaugh, a Republican appointed by Donald Trump, even rose to the government’s defense after Justice Samuel Alito attacked Biden administration officials who, Alito claimed, were too demanding toward the platforms. After Alito ranted about what he called “constant pestering” by White House officials who would sometimes “curse” at corporate officials or treat them like “subordinates,” Kavanaugh said that, in his experience, White House press aides often call up members of the media and “berate” them if they don’t like the press’s coverage. Similarly, Kagan admitted that “like Justice Kavanaugh, I’ve had experience encouraging people to suppress their own speech” after a journalist published a bad editorial or a piece with a factual error. But this sort of routine back-and-forth between White House officials and reporters is not a First Amendment violation unless there is some kind of threat or coercion. Why should the rule be any different for social media companies? So Benjamin Aguiñaga, the lawyer trying to defend the Fifth Circuit’s order, arrived at the Court this morning facing an already skeptical bench. And his disastrous response to a hypothetical from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson only dug him deeper into a hole. Jackson imagined a scenario where various people online challenged teenagers to jump out of windows, and that there actually was an epidemic of teens seriously injuring themselves by doing so. Could the government, she asked, encourage the platforms to pull down content urging young people to defenestrate themselves? Aguiñaga’s answer was “no” — an answer that provoked an incredulous Chief Justice John Roberts to restate the question and ask Aguiñaga to answer it again. And yet the lawyer still clung to his view that the government cannot encourage Twitter or Facebook to remove content urging people to hurl themselves out of windows. It is likely, for what it’s worth, that at least two justices will dissent. Last October, the Court temporarily blocked the Fifth Circuit’s Murthy decision while this case was being litigated before the justices, but it did so over objections by three justices: Alito, plus Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. On Monday, Gorsuch did ask a few questions suggesting that he may have reconsidered his previous position because he now views the Fifth Circuit’s injunction as too broad, but Thomas and Alito appeared determined to back their fellow members of the judiciary’s far right. So, while an alliance between the Court’s center left and its center right appears likely to hold in the Murthy case, that could change rapidly if former President Donald Trump is returned to office and gets to replace some of the current justices with members of the Fifth Circuit (or with other judges who share Thomas and Alito’s MAGA-infused approach to judging). But for the time being, at least, most of the justices appear to recognize that the government needs to function. And that means that the Fifth Circuit’s attempt to cut off communications between the Biden administration and the platforms is likely to fail.
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The Mr. Beastification of entertainment
Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. Mr. Beast, at the 2023 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. | Michael Tran/AFP via Getty Images The most popular YouTuber in the world is going Hollywood. A helicopter drops Mr. Beast and his friends onto the roof of an abandoned hotel, resting on the water’s edge of a Mediterranean resort town. They’re about to spend the next seven days there, trying not to die, all in service of a recent YouTube video called “I Survived 7 Days in an Abandoned City.” “This once beautiful city was bombed and abandoned because of war,” Mr. Beast’s voiceover explains. Which city? What war? It’s not yet clear, and at no point in the rest of the 17-minute video does MrBeast (as it’s styled on his channel) — age 25, real name Jimmy Donaldson — explain where he is. Outside of a half-second appearance of a postcard with the town’s name (Kupari), the location and its history as a casualty of the Croatian War of Independence in the early 1990s goes unacknowledged. Why he’s there, however, is obvious to anyone familiar with his oeuvre. Mr. Beast is a YouTube creator whose approach to video production is far less interested in what is on screen than in what will make the numbers in the bottom left corner go up. What matters is more views, longer watch times, and more subscribers, and nothing in a Mr. Beast video is not in service of this goal: not the creepily airbrushed thumbnails, not the titles with an ever-increasing number of zeros (“Last to Leave Circle Wins $500,000,” “If You Can Carry $1,000,000 You Keep It!,” “$1 vs $100,000,000 House!”), not the watch time (usually around 20 minutes, or roughly the length of a meal), not the total lack of politics, current events, or extraneous details like, say, the complex aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Since starting his YouTube channel in 2012 at age 13, Donaldson has been a devoted student of virality, shirking basically everything else in his life in service to the YouTube algorithm. It worked; at 244 million subscribers, his is currently the second most popular channel in the world, second only to T-Series, an Indian record label. (Cocomelon, the beloved of iPad babies, is third.) His enormous fanbase, largely made up of children and teenagers, doesn’t mind that he is, as the New York Times magazine put it, “not particularly funny or well spoken or physically striking,” nor that he’s a socially awkward introvert who is “not really good at keeping friends.” They care about him because Donaldson has figured out what makes a perfect YouTube video, how to capture young people’s dwindling attention spans by giving them nonstop visual stimulation with just enough real human drama and glimpses of the American dream that they can feel good about watching it. Now, with a just-announced deal — rumored to be worth as much as $100 million — to host an Amazon reality competition show with the biggest single prize in TV history ($5 million), he’s coming for Hollywood, too. If your first thought is that this sounds a little icky, you’ve probably aged out of the Mr. Beast demographic The Mr. Beast origin story, as recounted in profiles in Time, Rolling Stone, Bloomberg, and the New York Times, goes like this: After a Crohn’s disease diagnosis halted his baseball career in his sophomore year of high school, he turned his focus to his YouTube page, where he already had a presence making gaming content. Over time, his channel filled up with the standard fare of a teenage boy experimenting to see what sticks: There are bait-y headlines about “HOW TO UNLOCK ANY IPHONE,” Bee Movie memes, silly stunts (he counts to 10,000 and later 100,000 in one sitting, then watches fellow YouTuber Jake Paul’s terrible music video, “It’s Everyday Bro” for 10 hours straight), and letters to his future self (naturally, they are all about how many subscribers he hopes to have). After dropping out of community college midway through his first semester, his mother kicked him out of the house. Luckily, he’d also just scored his first brand deal and used the money in a video called “Giving A Random Homeless Man $10,000” in which he does just that. Its success was the beginning of a cycle in which the more money he’d give away, the more attention it got, the more money he’d make from sponsorships, and the more money he’d be able to give away next time. It’s a cycle that’s continued to this day, where a typical Mr. Beast video might pit a hundred people against each other to win $500,000 (the last to leave a certain designated area wins the money; at one point the contestants were forced to stand still for 24 hours straight and the last 10 remained in the circle for a full 12 days), or, in his most popular video ever, creating a real-life version of the dystopian Korean Netflix series Squid Game. On his charity-focused channel, Beast Philanthropy, Donaldson films himself and his team rebuilding a school in Cameroon, paying for kids’ cleft palate surgeries, and giving away $30 million worth of food. If your first thought is that this sounds a little icky, you’ve probably aged out of the Mr. Beast demographic, who have grown up less on traditional film and television created by adults but on videos created by influencers not much older than themselves. Last year, when Donaldson advertised his video “1,000 Blind People See for the First Time,” the lawyer and popular TikToker Alex Clavering tweeted, “There is something so demonic about this and I can’t even articulate what it is.” 81,000 people liked the tweet, drawing the stark differences between the kind of people who watch Mr. Beast videos and (presumably older) people who use Twitter. While many have criticized Donaldson for white saviorism, poverty profiteering, and exploitation, Clavering made clear that it wasn’t Donaldson’s individual acts of philanthropy that felt off, it’s the implication that “a single rich guy paid for life-changing surgery for us, and it’s easy to do this.” In response to such criticisms, Donaldson has tweeted, “I already know I’m gonna get canceled because I uploaded a video helping people, and to be 100% clear, I don’t care.” As with any celebrity as famous as Mr. Beast, with every bit of criticism, the comments and replies are filled with his defenders. In part, this is because Mr. Beast’s viewers, like any fans, feel as though they know him, even if it’s mediated through a screen. His videos almost always feature his clique: employees-slash-friends Karl Jacobs, Chandler Hallow, Tareq Salameh, Nolan Hansen, and Kris Tyson, the latter of whom came out as transgender last year. In the face of fans’ harassment, Donaldson defended Tyson in a tweet, writing “All this transphobia is starting to piss me off.” Donaldson has admitted he isn’t good at keeping friends and that “all my friends revolve around work.” In recounting his first meeting with his now-girlfriend, South African esports caster Thea Booysen, Donaldson said on a podcast that he had to pepper her with specific questions before dating because “I don’t really get along with women if they don’t love learning, they’re not obsessive, they don’t have a hobby.” His perfect idea of a date, he said, is the two of them taking an IQ test and then studying to see if they can beat their scores. Donaldson currently employs 500 people, 300 on his production team and 200 at his snack company, Feastables, which reportedly accounts for about 70 percent of his total revenue. They’re based in Greenville, North Carolina, where he’s transformed the town into a creator economy paradise, complete with a five-home cul-de-sac locals call “Beastville” where he and his crew live and work. He’s now a citywide hero, acting as something between Santa Claus and Willy Wonka: Kids reportedly crowd around wherever he goes, dreaming of being in one of his videos. Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for MrBeast Burger Mr. Beast at the opening of the first Mr. Beast Burger restaurant at the American Dream mall in New Jersey. The more immediate issue with producing the world’s most-viewed YouTube videos is what it takes to make them: Not only are they expensive (the Squid Game video reportedly cost $3.5 million), but former employees have accused the Mr. Beast company of fostering dangerous and exploitative conditions. One editor said that Donaldson berated him almost every day, called him offensive names, and described a workplace of favoritism and toxic perfectionism. Another former employee said that he believed he was let go because he was the only one campaigning for better safety protocols; in response, a Mr. Beast spokesperson told Time that “the company has high standards for performance and not everyone is best suited for this work.” Because of Donaldson’s reputation for giving money away to subscribers, scammers have used his likeness to promote AI giveaways and referral schemes (Donaldson has also been accused of misleading his followers by promoting a cryptocurrency that tanked in 2021). Despite pulling in around $600 million to $700 million per year, according to his own estimate, Donaldson’s production company does not make a profit and does not expect to be profitable this year. Instead, he reinvests the money into his charity channel and his other videos, or his numerous other business ventures. Primary among them is Feastables, the snack brand that once included a chocolate bar called “Deez Nuts” (they’re no longer allowed to use the name after a company called Dee’s Nuts won a lawsuit against it). He’s currently planning Mr. Beast-branded games and apps, and has a deal with the collectible toy company Moose Toys. Though he briefly ran a ghost kitchen burger chain, last year Donaldson sued the operating company, calling the burgers “disgusting” and “inedible”; they then countersued. “The more I suffer, the more you guys watch” There’s a solid chance that, if you’re reading this, you find Mr. Beast’s whole thing rather distasteful and/or a grim signifier of the state of children’s entertainment: uninterested in quality and only making bigger, louder, more attention-grabbing and easier-to-consume content for kids to get addicted to and form misguided parasocial relationships with. These interpretations may be true, but what’s at least a little bit interesting about Mr. Beast is that the man behind it doesn’t appear to be enjoying himself. Watch enough of his videos and you’ll have seen Donaldson spend 50 hours buried alive (and later a whole week), 50 hours in Antarctica, 24 hours trapped in ice, 30 days without food, seven days alone in a white padded room (a video that made me feel deranged by the end of it), and a full week on a small raft in the middle of the ocean. (Which ocean? C’mon, we’ve been through this.) He has paid assassins, bounty hunters, the FBI, and US military members to try and hunt him and lost money in the process. After consuming enough Mr. Beast content, it’s hard not to wonder who’s actually having fun here and to think how much you’d rather watch a behind-the-scenes documentary about the grunt work that goes into each video. “The more I suffer, the more you guys watch,” he says on day four of being trapped at sea. Later, as a storm approaches and he and his crew attempt to build a waterproof structure that will last the night, he delivers an upbeat scripted ad for Shopify. (The structure does not hold and they all have to sleep under soaked-through towels; one of his crew members describes it as “the worst experience I’ve ever had in my entire life.”) Some of his former employees have spoken out against these kinds of stunts and brainless stimulation for clicks; one director of a Mr. Beast video told Time, “These algorithms are poisonous to humanity. They prioritize addictive, isolated experiences over ethical social design, all just for ads. It’s not MrBeast I have a problem with. It’s platforms which encourage someone like me to study a retention graph so I can make the next video more addicting. At Beast I did that on steroids.” By exploiting YouTube’s algorithm, Mr. Beast has created a modern-day arena for influencer-gladiators to torture each other and where average Joes can compete for a piece of the spoils. It’s Jackass if the Jackass dudes read self-help books and idolized Elon Musk. This is a strategy that legacy entertainment companies are looking to mimic. With his Amazon competition show, Donaldson is the latest in a long list of digital native influencers who’ve attempted to go Hollywood, usually with floundering success. That’s because famous influencers are in large part one-person shows who deeply understand their followers, and studio executives and traditional film and television producers have different goals and different audiences to attract. It hasn’t stopped them from trying to harness the popularity of influencers, of course, but the pivot doesn’t always land. What’s easier to imagine than Mr. Beast becoming, say, a late-night talk show host or TV presenter is the entertainment industry continuing its current race to the bottom of what’s profitable in the attention economy. By leaning harder into algorithmically generated recommendations and lowest-common-denominator programming, they’re mirroring the Mr. Beast philosophy of creating content totally devoid of complexity and point of view in the hope that it’s addicting enough that people will pay $10 a month for it. Unfortunately for the Netflixes and NBCs of the world, however, they’re up against a guy who says he wants to give all his money away — just as long as you “like” and subscribe.
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Putin’s reelection puts him in a class of Russia’s longest-ruling autocrats
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with the media at his campaign headquarters in Moscow on March 18, 2024. | Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images Putin has eliminated all of his most significant rivals, cementing his grip on power. As expected, Russian President Vladimir Putin has won his fifth term in office, following a campaign in which all his significant rivals were barred from running, imprisoned, or dead. Voting started Friday and concluded Sunday. Putin won the contest with over 87 percent of the vote, with a reported 77 percent turnout. The record post-Soviet win was Putin’s choreographed attempt to demonstrate his popularity — and that of the war in Ukraine. But it is impossible to take much away, given the level of repression in Russian society and Putin’s ambition to make himself synonymous with the Russian state. The results come just a month after the death of Putin’s most potent and vocal foe, the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, while he was serving a 19-year sentence in an Arctic penal colony on multiple charges including extremism. It’s also a little over two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Russia refers to as a “special military operation.” Western countries have backed Ukraine during the grueling two-year war and imposed heavy sanctions on Russia, but those efforts have done little to loosen Putin’s grip on power; on the contrary, Putin’s government is at its most repressive since he first took power in 2000. Even before his fifth term starts, Putin will already be the longest-serving Russian leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. If he serves out the entirety of this six-year term, he will surpass Stalin and be in the running next with Catherine the Great and then perhaps eventually Peter the Great — two rulers whose imperial power Putin has sought to mimic in his conquest of Ukraine and other former Soviet and imperial lands. With his reelection, Putin will be in power till at least 2030, unless he dies or is somehow removed from power in the intervening six years. How Putin engineered his decades in power Putin’s ruthless quest to build power — not only his own, but Russia’s — might come as a surprise to anyone who saw him when he first became president in 2000. An unknown, unmemorable bureaucrat from St. Petersburg who served in the Soviet spy agency in Dresden during the tail end of the Cold War, Putin hardly seemed poised to gain the near-total power he now has in Russia. But through a combination of immense wealth, cronyism, fraud, increasingly cruel repression, and constant information warfare, Putin has consolidated his power over the past 24 years, even when his deputy Dmitry Medvedev was nominally in charge. Putin came into incredible wealth following the collapse of the Soviet Union and was appointed acting president in 1999 after Boris Yeltsin resigned. He was officially elected in 2000, serving his constitutionally mandated two terms — and even seemed more willing to cooperate with the West during that time. But he was also displaying imperial ambitions, fighting wars in Chechnya and Georgia. After Medvedev pushed through a constitutional change allowing additional presidential terms, Putin regained the presidency in 2012. Amid the most fervent protests against the autocratic and corrupt regime, his government began instituting and escalating brutal crackdowns on minority groups like the LGBTQ population, opposition members, and civil society to entrench a narrative of Russian tradition. “In the 1990s–2000s, Russia experienced a range of issues such as economic and demographic crises and the loss of its impactful role on the international stage, causing the perceived ‘emasculation’ of the population,” Radzhana Buyantueva, a researcher studying LGBTQ communities in Russia and their intersection with the political sphere, explained to Vox over email in December. “The Kremlin has utilized these insecurities in its anti-gender queerphobic propaganda,” cracking down on LGBTQ groups and other perceived opponents while also militarizing society and “culminating in the escalating military aggression toward neighboring states (Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014).” Putin also systematically undermined or eliminated political opposition, cementing his hold on power not just through a popular narrative about Russia’s national identity, but also with election fraud, murder, poisonings, draconian jail sentences, and other political repression. Over the past year, the Kremlin quashed multiple attempts to compete against him in this weekend’s elections. Though three competitors did stand in this year’s contest, they were all state-backed and lacked any real popular support. There were multiple true opposition candidates with demonstrated popular support — like Boris Nadezhdin, an anti-war candidate — who attempted to stand against Putin this year but were barred from doing so. Now, almost anyone who would vocally oppose or present an alternative to Russian propaganda has been silenced or has fled.
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Could a gambling “error” cost you March Madness?
March Madness is here. And that means the biggest mainstream sports betting event of the year is, too. | Karen Warren/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images Sports betting is about the odds, but sports books decide whether the odds are fair. The 2024 NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments are here. That means it’s time to fill out a bracket, to suddenly become the biggest fan of a school you’d never heard of before this week, or to coat your body in team colors before every game (depending on your obsession level, of course). For many Americans, it’s also time to place some bets. This is “the most mainstream betting event of the year,” says David Forman, vice president of research at the American Gaming Association (AGA). “It used to be office pools and squares contests.” Now, with the explosion in legalized gambling across the US, he says, “people in almost 40 states have the ability to bet on the tournament legally, and we think they’re going to bet about $2.7 billion on the men’s and women’s tournaments.” If that estimate has you staggering, you obviously don’t watch all that much live sports. Because if you did, you would have already heard from a slew of celebrities, like Jamie Foxx and Rob Gronkowski, selling you on the virtues of major sports books like BetMGM, FanDuel, and DraftKings. You also must’ve missed the headlines around the Super Bowl last month, when the AGA estimated that 67.8 million Americans would bet roughly $23.1 billion. Sports betting is bigger than ever, and 2023 was the biggest year yet. But as more states legalize gambling, effective regulation hasn’t always kept pace. And it’s left some bettors wondering whether their bet will be honored. Tournament betting is going to be wild One of the reasons March Madness is such a big-time event for sports betting is the number of games being played — sometimes at the same time. In just the first four days of the tournament, there will be 48 games. “The thing that makes it very bettable is the structure of the tournament,” says Jack Andrews, co-founder of Unabated Sports, a subscription service that purports to help sports bettors increase their chances of winning. “On the East Coast, the tournament starts at noon on Thursday [March 21]. And then you have game after game after game after game after game. It’s basically a betting bonanza for sports bettors from noon to midnight.” In-game betting and prop bets are other forms of wagering that are very popular during the tournament, “especially betting the over/unders,” says David Vinturella, an instructor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who developed and taught the school’s first ever semester-long course in sports betting this year and who previously worked for a major sports book. He explains over/under bets like this: Betting the over is wagering that a team will score more than sports books’ predicted figure. Betting the under is the opposite. Another well-liked prop bet Andrews describes is betting on the first team to score 15 points. “That is hugely popular in Vegas,” he says. “That’s not really betting on the game, you know — instead you’re just betting on which team gets off to a hot start.” If you win, will your bet be honored? With millions of people expected to place bets with sports books throughout the tournament, can bettors be sure they’ll be paid out if their long-shot bet wins big? The answer to that question was a bit murky in the days before legal sports betting, when offshore sports books were the only game in town, says Andrews. “That’s the difference between the US and offshore sports books. If you have a problem offshore, the offshore sports book says, ‘I’m judge, jury, and executioner, and you’re out.’ Whereas in the states with regulated sports betting, [regulators] are supposed to make sure it’s a fair bet.” Still, there have been stories recently about sports books in the US voiding bets that would’ve paid out big to bettors. The sports books use a clause in the fine print of their regulations saying that if there’s an obvious error with the odds in the bet (a.k.a. “palpable error”), they can cancel your bet. Critics say this is unfair because the sports books have multiple chances to prevent a soon-to-be-voided bet from ever happening. “The bet is offered by the sports book, the bettor offers a wager to the sports book, and then the sports book accepts the wager,” says Andrews. “They had three chances to stop the bet from ever happening.” Vinturella says that voided bets definitely happen, but that they are rare. “The process of getting a license and securing the license for a mobile sports betting company is not easy or cheap. So sports books don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize that license.” Andrews agrees that most bettors will never have an issue with a sports book over a palpable error. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, sports books just eat the loss,” he says. But Andrews thinks regulators often have a “pro-operator” approach because “they’re funded by the operators,” and “they don’t want DraftKings to lose $1 billion because of something that should have never been out there.” That’s why regulators should have clear sets of rules for determining what is and isn’t a clear mistake. A good example is New Jersey, where the Division of Gaming Enforcement has a two-step process for deciding whether the error was palpable. Step one: Was the bet legal to begin with? If so, good. If not, the bet doesn’t count. Step two: Was there a risk of losing? If so, the wager stands. If there’s no risk, then the bet is voided because it must’ve been a mistake. It’s that sort of easy-to-follow process that will let bettors trust regulators and confidently participate in the fast-growing billion-dollar industry — ultimately benefiting the sports books, too. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. 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