Yes, in the same way an online stock market interface is a betting site. In the same way that stock markets allow (in principle) accurate valuation of companies through people buying and selling stocks, a prediction market should enable better-than current prediction of the future- because the people making the predictions have skin in the game, and have an incentive to change their prediction if they genuinely think the event will go the other way.
Why do people instantly jump to the extreme negative? Any technology can be used for to do bad things. The community is aware of this possibility and have taken precautions. Also any financial market can also be viewed as an assassination market. You can short a stock and assassinate the CEO and profit, but people don’t actually do that in practice. Also, Augur v1 (V2 is coming out this month) has existed for about 2 years and there were no assassination markets on it. The community would resolve them as “invalid”, so it’a not possible to guarantee profit unlike in the regular stock market.
If people tout anonymity and 'censorship resistance' as a market's main advantage over other markets, it's hardly surprising that people focus on the use cases - hypothetical and otherwise - which wouldn't be possible on prediction market platforms where the platform operator knows their customer and rules out certain types of trade. If your USP is the ability to do 'bad things' to manipulate outcomes [manipulating the 'reporting' is probably a likelier outcome than assassination, admittedly] with little chance of your trades being discovered or reversed then people are going to focus on that.
Am I looking at the wrong product website or is Auger a betting site?