Rob Minnick was in a bathroom in Paris when it dawned on him that he might need some help. Having flown 3,700 miles to explore the French capital, he kept disappearing for 10 or 15 minutes at a time.

“People must have thought I had the worst stomach problems in the world,” he said of his trip, in February 2022. While his stomach was fine, he was not. Minnick had developed an addiction to gambling.

Staring down at his phone, he had searched repeatedly for anything that might provide a quick hit, from rapid sports wagers and slot machine-style games to blackjack and roulette.

Returning home to New Jersey, he started attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings and did not place a bet for another eight months. In November 2022, he walked into a casino and wagered so much money over 12 straight hours that it would take him six months to pay off the debt.

Minnick was 23, broke and definitely in need of help. He handed over control of his bank account to his family, and returned to GA meetings – a well-trodden path for many compulsive gamblers – but before long he struck upon another, less conventional, strand of recovery.

Less than four months after his last bet, Minnick sat in a Dunkin’ drive-thru, and again stared down into his phone. This time, though, he started to talk about how the odds of landing on black or red in a game of roulette are worse than you might think. It was a niche video to post on TikTok, but racked up more than1m views.

Hundreds more followed, under the username rob_odaat: short for “one day at a time”, the popular mantra in help programs like GA.

One post last year started with footage of someone punching a betting terminal, before cutting to Minnick. “Honestly, I was there myself,” he says. “I never destroyed any machines, but I destroyed a lot of things in my life.”

Detailing his experiences with addiction, and the possible dangers of gambling, would over time present Minnick with “an active reason to talk about it more often, to stay accountable to more people”, he said. His recovery became “blended” between anonymous support groups and public posts online.

Gambling is booming across the US, and academics, clinicians and campaigners have warned that a rising number of people appear to be grappling with problems. But compulsive gambling is typically endured, and confronted, out of public view.

On TikTok, Minnick is in the minority. The platform is awash with videos underlining the potential upside for betters: winning big. But there is little scrutiny of the material upside for the industry’s dominant companies when people bet big, or the downside for bettors who run into trouble.

Such platforms are designed to cultivate attention. If a user watches most of one video, they can be sure to expect more of the same – be it synchronized dance routines, advice on how to be “demure” in different situations, or gambling. One clip of Drake winning seven figures on roulette, say, could quickly lead to another featuring an influencer talking about winning, and another with a personality claiming to lay out a “guarantee to make money”.

Such rabbit holes are helping to normalize gambling – which remains in its infancy as a legal activity across dozens of states – among a young audience of social media users in their teens and 20s, according to Minnick, who is now 25. While creating posts around problem gambling in an attempt to redress the balance, he has been troubled by a prevailing discourse that he divides into two distinct categories.

“The first is that gambling addiction’s a joke,” said Minnick. “The scary category, and the one that I think is going to cause a lot of problems, is that gambling is profitable. It’s that if you are losing gambling, if you are addicted to gambling, that means you’re a bad gambler and you haven’t figured it out.”

The latter perception has helped set the stage for a microindustry of influencers pushing gambling picks and advice. “None of it actually works,” said Minnick. “The people making the money are not the ones making the picks. They’re the ones selling the picks.”

In one post, Minnick listed 20 questions, to which seven answers of “yes” is deemed a red flag for problem gambling. Top comments included “not addicted I’m dedicated”; “$20 says I answered yes to more than you did”; and “20/20 but a big win is due”.

Minnick feels outnumbered. “I’m a guy who’s making videos in his house,” he said, up against “production companies that are making fantastic videos” and influencers promoting their wins. It would be easier, he suggested, if an A-list celebrity came forward and talked about their troubles with gambling. “Right now it’s David v Goliath, just naturally. I don’t have anything on my side.”

Last year Netflix released Painkiller, a drama series about Purdue Pharma, the former manufacturer of the prescription painkiller OxyContin, and its role in the opioid epidemic. To Minnick, the plot felt familiar.

At Purdue, the mindset was: “our drug does good things for most people that use it, and the people that abuse are the ones that should take the blame; it’s their fault, it’s not our drug’s fault,” Minnick said. The betting industry’s marketing around “responsible gambling” – and its focus on how gamblers themselves, rather than gambling platforms, should act responsibly – “is more or less that exact same thing”, he concluded, whether intentional or not.

He still believes the framing of such messaging is “just offensive to problem gamblers”, but Minnick’s views have somewhat softened. There are plenty of people with “decent intentions” who work in the responsible gambling divisions of betting companies, he said, “but they have their hands tied as to how much they can help, before it becomes a problem for profit”.

Reminders to gamble responsibly are helpful for 90% of people who bet, according to Minnick. But to his mind, such messaging is targeted at the 10% of gamblers – either at risk of developing problems, or who have already developed them – who cannot simply be told.

“Responsible gambling is awesome, but it’s not a learnable skill,” he said. “It is something that 90% of people just already do. And that’s not where any money is actually made for the industry.”