What if a major tech platform is banned or nationalised?
A platform ban/seizure in a large market reads as a trade-war proxy: it pressures NVDA and the semis on supply-chain exposure while Alibaba and the yuan take the China-retaliation leg. Rhymes with the 2020 US TikTok ban threat and the 2021 China platform crackdown (Didi delisting), which hit the named equities hard but stayed largely idiosyncratic. Transmission: US chips into China, China platforms into US listings - so escalation risk is mutual delisting/export-control tit-for-tat. Forward angle: the tail is a rare-earth or chip-tool counter-strike that broadens it into a genuine macro tariff shock.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A major social/tech platform is banned or nationalized in a large market. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.