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Welcome to Popular Information, a newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism.
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Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan says his company is a “global truth machine.” Coplan has argued that Polymarket is “the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now“ and creates “an information landscape with less sensationalism and more truth.” In June 2025, Coplan announced a partnership with X because the “two top truth seeking apps on the internet are stronger together.”
More recently, Polymarket, in an apparent effort to increase engagement, has been using X to promote brazen misinformation.
On August 10, an official Polymarket account on X posted a graphic falsely claiming that, in the United States, babies receive 72 injections. President Trump, according to the Polymarket post, was ending this practice.
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This graphic, which was previously posted by the White House in January, is false, according to multiple independent fact checkers. PolitiFact, which rated the graphic “False,” reported that babies “received anywhere from 12 to 30 shots before their second birthday depending on the use of combination vaccines and annual COVID-19 and flu vaccines.”
Trump also personally claimed on Truth Social that the United States required “72 ‘jabs’ for perfectly healthy babies.” PolitiFact found that figure “takes into account 18 years of recommended vaccines, including an annual flu and COVID-19 shot, and assumes that each vaccine dose would be given as a separate injection.”
FactCheck.org similarly found the claim was incorrect. It noted that “a person could complete the U.S. childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule as of early 2025 while receiving less than two dozen shots and oral vaccines.” The claim also failed fact checks by STAT News and CNN.
This is not an isolated incident.
On August 3, Polymarket’s main X account posted that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that he would require an ID to make purchases at city-owned grocery stores.
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This claim is false. It was never “revealed” by Mamdani or anyone else. It was a baseless rumor that spread widely on right-wing media outlets, according to the Associated Press. “When we’re talking about a city-run grocery store, one in each borough, which by the way, you do not need an ID to shop at, no matter what you’ve just heard in the news of today,” Mamdani said during an August 3 media interview.
The false claim, which was not corrected, garnered 19.6 million views on X. Polymarket used the attention to promote its prediction market on whether Mamdani would open a city-owned grocery store by December 31.
The tactic reveals that Polymarket’s business is not “truth.” Polymarket seeks to maximize attention for its markets. That frequently involves spreading false information.
Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.