Has Polymarket been paying creators to post fake betting videos? Norway is imposing broad restrictions on AI for school kids, and Chinese-style EV battery swap stations coming to Europe

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Polymarket has reportedly been paying creators to post fake bedding videos.
Norway is imposing broad restrictions on AI for elementary school kids.
And Chinese-style EV battery swap stations are coming to Europe. It's Monday, June 22nd, and here's a quick look at some of the news happening in and around tech this morning from Engadget.
Well, in case you needed another reason to be wary of those videos showing people winning big on Polymarket, an investigation by The Wall Street Journal has found that the company is paying social media creators to post misleading content promoting the prediction market. Of the 1,105 TikTok videos the publication reviewed, 778 appeared to show someone placing a bet, but a closer look reportedly revealed that none of the latter featured the actual Polymarket website, instead using dummy sites made to look like the real thing. For more than half of the videos that appeared to show winning bets, those bets would in reality have been losses. The publication spoke to creators who worked with Polymarket and viewed materials they say they were given to ensure their videos were convincing and engaging. In addition, Polymarket reportedly also enlisted a social media army to repost those videos and help them go viral. Polymarket has been making headlines this year as governments grapple with how to regulate prediction markets. Minnesota last month became the first US state to ban them. Other states have tried to do the same, but multiple lawsuits have challenged those efforts. Meanwhile, Spain blocked Polymarket and another prediction market, Calshi, back in May, as it figures out whether they violate the country's gambling law.
Norway is imposing a strict ban on the use of generative AI tools by elementary school kids. That's according to a report by Reuters. Norway's prime minister suggested at a press conference that AI lets children skip crucial steps in their education and that schools should focus on teaching them how to read, write, and do mathematics. These standards will be imposed at the start of the next school year, beginning in late August. The ban impacts students from 1st through 7th grade, but the policy also extends to teens, albeit in a reduced fashion. Kids aged 14 to 16 can still use generative AI, but only with a teacher's supervision. Teens 17 and above are encouraged to use AI appropriately on their own. This is not the first move Norway has made to remove tech from classrooms. The country banned smartphones from schools back in 2024, which has proven to be a success. It led to a reduction in bullying, better grades and a significant decrease in the number of visits to psychologists for mental health issues. These results were especially potent with girls. Norway is also planning a social media ban for all children under 16, which is similar to how Australia handles things. A bill will be introduced to parliament by the end of the year. The US has also been slowly making moves to limit the amount of time kids can spend with AI chatbots. The Senate and the House have been discussing a bill that would require AI companies to implement an age verification process and ban them from providing chatbots to minors.
Octopus Energy, the UK's largest energy provider, has teamed up with CATL, the world's biggest EV battery maker, to bring Chinese-style battery-swap stations to Europe. The pair claim they want to roll out a network of facilities across the continent targeted at keeping electric trucks on the road for longer. Each hub would be capable of servicing thousands of trucks a day, replacing depleted cells with fresh ones in minutes. Such a system may even be faster than filling a conventional truck with diesel, and it's certainly a lot cheaper. We've all heard EV boosters talk up battery swapping as the inevitable solution to range anxiety, especially without having to rinse your equipment with fast charging. In theory, you could just rock up to a station, dump your drained cells, and put freshly charged ones in, all in the time it takes you to visit the bathroom, perhaps. Of course, the truth was never as simple. The high price of batteries and the engineering required meant it never quite worked as well as they had hoped. Even Tesla abandoned the idea a decade ago. Octopus and CATL think that it's probably far more viable for trucking and it's the one part of the global transport ecosystem in which EVs don't yet make sense. Heavy industry, big trucks and ships carrying equally hefty loads require a lot more energy to move around, and batteries add more weight to the picture. But if trucks use smaller batteries and drivers are confident that they can get a fully charged replacement at every stage of their journey, well, then the equation starts to shift.