Kalshi and Polymarket crack down on paid influencers claiming election fraud

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Kalshi and Polymarket crack down on paid influencers claiming election fraud

By Bobby Allyn, Jude Joffe-Block

Updated Monday, June 8, 2026 • 9:23 PM EDT

Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday

As vote tallies in the Los Angeles mayoral election trickled in slowly over the last week, unsubstantiated claims exploded on X that a fraudulent plot was underway to deprive the MAGA-backed former reality TV star Spencer Pratt the second-place slot to advance to the November runoff against incumbent Democrat Karen Bass.<br>A portion of these unfounded conspiracy theories pointed to changing betting odds for the three top candidates on prediction market sites Kalshi and Polymarket to suggest something sinister is afoot with the vote count. Some influencers supercharging such fraud claims online did so in posts sponsored by the companies themselves.

Related Story: NPR<br>"They are actually doing it. They are counting votes until SPENCER LOSES. Someone DO SOMETHING," Trump-aligned influencer Mila Joy wrote to her half a million followers a day after the election as she reshared a Polymarket post with a graph showing that Pratt's betting odds were falling on the site.<br>"Is CA cheating to get Spencer Pratt out?" questioned commentator David Freeman, who posts under the handle Gunther Eagleman on X, as he shared a Kalshi post showing the odds between Pratt and progressive Democrat Nithya Raman. The Associated Press called the second-place spot for Raman on Monday afternoon after her vote share overtook Pratt's on Sunday.<br>At the bottom of both X posts, the words "paid partnership" appear in tiny font, a subtle reference to the millions of dollars Kalshi and Polymarket have pumped into programs that pay influencers to reshare corporate posts as a way to boost engagement.<br>The Los Angeles mayoral race is the clearest example yet of how prediction market posts about changing betting odds for candidates are being weaponized on X to sow doubt about the integrity of elections.

Related Story: NPR<br>It's likely a preview of what's to come this year ahead of the midterm election. Kalshi and Polymarket are increasingly pervading ever more corners of daily life. Their rise has set off dozens of legal battles and raised novel questions about the ways betting on just about anything can have real-world consequences. Now it appears they are driving the latest battlefield in political misinformation wars on X.<br>"From the perspective of the influencer looking to get rich, their only job is to attract attention," Emerson Brooking, a disinformation expert at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, wrote in an email. "They will do this by sharing markets that align with what their audiences want to see. And if the betting markets are wrong, it is much wiser for them to allege fraud (and keep the lucrative promotions contract) rather than acknowledge that the gambling sites got it wrong."<br>In recent days, Kalshi and Polymarket have attempted to rein in some of their paid influencers. After NPR asked Kalshi about several partnership posts on Friday, the company said it told the influencers to take the posts down. Some of the posts, including Freeman's post questioning "CA cheating," have been deleted. Semafor first reported on Kalshi's crackdown.<br>On Monday, Polymarket told NPR it, too, is pulling back its sponsorship of some creators who were spreading election falsehoods. Joy's post is still live on X with the "paid partnership" tag, but the tag has been removed from posts by two other influencers paid by Polymarket.<br>"Companies shouldn't be paying people to spread misinformation," said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, who has reviewed the sponsored posts that flew across X. "In the Trump Republican Party, fraud allegations are going to be often received with a lot of enthusiasm, especially when people often get confused about the difference between the odds of someone winning and vote share."<br>Inside Kalshi and Polymarket paid partnerships

Paying influencers as social media promoters is a type of "growth hacking" tech startups often deploy to maximize the reach of their brand in an attempt to drive more users to the services.

Related Story: NPR<br>"It's a high-risk, high-reward situation," said Seton Hall University's Jess Rauchberg, who studies digital media culture. "But it's a strategy that gets people talking about the brand."<br>Kalshi and Polymarket have offered creators as much as $500 per post, according to two people who formerly worked on partnerships at Kalshi and Polymarket and who were not authorized to speak publicly about the programs.<br>Inside Kalshi, the approach has sparked debate over what responsibility the company has when creators promote its site by spreading misinformation and other harmful content across X, according to the former Kalshi employee.<br>A Kalshi spokesperson confirmed on Monday that the company...