The Age of Sportsbooks: Health Concerns Rise with Surge in Sports Betting
Bryn Mawr College’s Adam Poliak, an assistant professor trained in natural language processing (NLP), analyzes search trends to understand the impacts of legalized sports betting in the U.S.
In 2018, the Murphy v. NCAA Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for states to legalize sports betting. A new study co-authored by Bryn Mawr College Assistant Professor of Computer Science Adam Poliak has found that since that ruling, the unprecedented surge in sports betting, particularly online sports betting, has driven record increases in online searches related to gambling addiction. Published in JAMA Internal Medicine and led by researchers from the University of California San Diego Qualcomm Institute and School of Medicine, the study reveals the need for policy and public health reforms to mitigate the risk of gambling.
The team gathered data between Jan. 1, 2016, and June 30, 2024, analyzing Google search trends with any mention of gambling and addiction, addict, anonymous, or hotline. They found searches such as “am I addicted to gambling” cumulatively increased 23 percent nationally, greater than the team expected, since Murphy v. NCAA.
Currently, 38 states have operational sportsbooks, which is a significant increase since 2017 when Nevada was the sole state to legalize betting. The team also found the total amount spent on sports wagers rose from $4.9 billion in 2017 to $121.1 billion in 2023, with 94 percent of wagers in 2023 placed online. With the growing popularity and convenience of online gambling, Poliak hopes these figures can bring awareness to the health consequences that result from exposure to and the normalization of sports betting.
“There needs to be more awareness of the real-life effects of online sports betting, as this is not just a problem, but a growing problem,” says Poliak. “We need more warnings, education, and advocacy about the dangers and addictive nature of sports betting, like there are for smoking and tobacco use.”
Poliak and his co-authors recommend public health and policy interventions from increased funding for gambling addiction services and enhanced advertising regulations to clinical training programs for healthcare professionals, stronger safeguards for online sportsbooks, expanded public awareness campaigns, and ongoing data sharing and research collaborations.
Among the tools the researchers use in the work is natural language processing (NLP), which Poliak teaches in his undergraduate lab at Bryn Mawr. “As this technology matures, it opens up the type of research that people in other fields can do; for example, people in public health can use social media data and search trends,” says Poliak. “How do you know what people are vaping these days? You could go to a bodega and see what’s on the shelves, or you can pull the data from Reddit to see what brands people are talking about. Social media and search open up the amounts of data and the different types of data that researchers can use, which will broaden the types of questions researchers across all fields can answer.”
One of the challenges in Natural Language Processing are the inherent biases that models learn from data, says Poliak, explaining that models learn from sets of large data compiled from both human sources and the internet. Poliak teaches his students to be aware of the biases within the models while harnessing the opportunities that come with this groundbreaking technology.
Playing a role in correcting for bias in NLP research is among the things that Poliak hopes to accomplish at Bryn Mawr.
“Computer science and technology are heavily male dominated,” says Poliak. “It’s really special to be in an institution where I am teaching the next generation of female leaders in the field and encouraging them to step out of their comfort zone.”
This semester, Poliak is teaching Introduction to Data Science and Computer Science Senior Seminar.
Media Coverage
The study by Poliak and his colleagues garnered nationwide media coverage. Outlets included MSN.com, NBC News, U.S. News and World Report, and the New York Post.