Peter Thiel, "libertarian," wants to buy Gawker's archive, which would give him the power to censor stories he didn't like

That’s a shitty excuse.

Because Gawker was a left-wing Breitbart at best. Good riddance.

I’m assuming you’re talking about Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, released without his permission.

I don’t feel sorry for them.

Let’s not get used to this. No person, no matter how famous should have to go through something like this. This shouldn’t be an expectation of celebrity. These women shouldn’t have to fear for their own privacy. And of course no person should ever feel entitled to the privacy of these women.

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For suing a media outlet that didn’t defame him out of existence through a proxy? Agreed.

Yes, that would be the proxy. Hogan/Bollea’s case was solid enough, and Gawker botched their own case by putting a scumbag like Daulerio on the stand.

The Rob Ford crack tape was also released without Ford’s permission. Would you have supported Thiel funding a lawsuit against Gawker on his behalf?

I get the Gawker hate and don’t think they were a paragon of journalism myself, but in the end this is about a thin-skinned billionaire contributing substantively to the destruction of a media outlet that made him personally uncomfortable. That’s a bad thing if you support a free press (something that Thiel, who’s expressed contempt for democratic institutions, does not).

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I’ll ask an alternate question: if Peter Thiel had offered to pay Jennifer Lawrence’s legal fees, would you have sided with the Reddit dudebros?

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Unlike you, I’ll answer the question: first, Thiel had as much of an existing relationship with Lawrence as with Hogan before the violation of either’s privacy, so the motives behind an offer to pay for her legal fees would be equally suspect; also, I don’t think Thiel had a personal vendetta against Reddit, which probably explains why he didn’t even think about being as “altruistic” as he was with Bollea.

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And I mean, that’s fine, but if you’re going to be mad at Thiel, being mad that he took down Gawker by funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker for violating his privacy probably isn’t the best stand to take imho. I quoted that Jezebel article because it’s a lovely example of Gawker’s journalistic integrity.

You want to be mad about Thiel possibly using his money to buy up the archives of an organization he took down apparently because they published an article about him being gay. The thing is, it was bound to happen anyway. Ooh, look at how the gross dudebros are objectifying women! Also Gawker: Hey, everybody, get a load of John Hamm’s junk! I’m as upset with the loss of Gawker as I would be about the loss of Breitbart, the New York Post, TMZ, or the National Enquirer.

If Thiel stood to gain from the suit it would be just as troubling. It’s the same kind of legal bullying we see from patent trolls who target so-called infringers who don’t have the money to defend themselves.

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The funny thing is all of the Gawker Media sites were/are creative commons. As long as someone wants to host the article, I’m not sure there’s much Thiel can do,

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Rob Ford! Whatever happened to that guy?

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I’m really incensed by the level of discourse here.

I’ve been reading Boing Boing since 2001 (when I was a history and chemical engineering undergrad). I also used to write for Gawker, on-and-off, in 2014 and 2015. Allow me to do my best to correct the record, here, on some facets of the “Gawker v. Bollea” case and Gawker’s merits as a news media outlet.

1. The case wasn’t “a perfectly reasonable invasion-of-privacy suit.” (per @glenblank) This suit was losing, justly, on First Amendment grounds when it was then strategically refiled in Terry Bollea’s home state and hometown, where he’s viewed as a local boy made good. A federal judge and a Florida state appeals court both reviewed the facts and deemed the tape a matter of public interest. You may think that sounds crazy or odious, but a major part of the reason why is that Terry Bollea himself made his sex life a significant part of the Hulk Hogan brand in his later years, with a variety of equally crazy or odious media appearances from radio interviews, to a tell-all memoir, to a reality TV show. Comparing what Gawker did to “the Fappening” hacks that Jezebel condemned (per @Mal_Tosevite) ignores the entire context, the tone of the accompanying article, as well as inaccurately imagining that Gawker posted the whole sex tape instead of a grainy, one-minute, 41-second clip, mostly to prove it existed and that they had it.

It’s certainly not my favorite Gawker article, but unless you think you know more about the law than U.S. District Judge James Whittemore, whose ruling forced Hogan’s team to try again at the state level, it would behoove you to exercise some humility about what qualifies as constitutionally protected speech.

A granular look at how the case was pursued leaves no doubt that what happened was an extreme and carefully executed case of monied interests bending the legal system into a cudgel for their own aims.

Case in point: Rather than pursue the highest monetary amount for their “client,” Terry Bollea’s legal team dropped the claim of “negligent infliction of emotional distress,” specifically because it was the only part of the suit covered by Gawker’s insurance policy, thus allowing their provider (St. Paul Fire & Marine Insurance Company) to leave the company high and dry, maximizing the financial damage and ensuring ruination. If the goal had been to penalize Gawker for overreach, that mission would have been accomplished very early in the court proceedings. Ultimately, the goal was to destroy Gawker for daring to be an independently owned voice that criticized Silicon Valley billionaires, like Thiel. Take an honest look at all the other stories about Peter Thiel that Gawker has published, exposing his financial support for climate denial and anti-immigrant activism, the failings of his dismal hedge fund Clarium Capital, and so on.

Ask yourself: Do any of you really think Thiel would have come out and said, “I have a vendetta against Gawker for writing ‘Facebook Billionaire’s Dangerous Party Draws Firefighters’ because it made me look like a cavalier dilettante, who got lucky with Facebook, and in whose failing hedge fund one should not entrust their private capital?” (Thiel funded multiple considerably less meritorious cases against Gawker concurrent with the Hogan episode, including one from that guy, Shiva Ayyadurai, who falsely claimed he invented email. Clearly, the goal wasn’t justice; it was to outspend Gawker Media’s legal war chest until something stuck, by any means necessary.)

2. Gawker published good scoops paid for by highly trafficked clickbait. Worse outlets existed, and still do, pocketing money on the trash people want to see online. Gawker was one that simultaneously let me go after Ben Carson’s stock-options fraud at CostCo, and James O’Keefe’s unqualified nepotism hire at Project Veritas, and to openly question the Obama administration’s unsubstantiated claims about the MH17 crash over Ukraine. In my experience, the people who hate Gawker the most typically never actually read Gawker; they only judged the site from the screaming headlines friends and family posted to social media. If all I knew about Gawker was the outline of Jon Hamm’s dick protruding from a loose pair of chinos, maybe I would hate it too, but guess what? Sites like The Superficial and TMZ still freaking exist and they never let a guy like me explain Barclay’s “Dark Pool” trading scandal to that same audience. So, be serious: what about this site didn’t deserve to exist again, exactly? Why not keep pushing until Taboola, and Gossip Cop, and RADAR online, are all sued out of existence too? What have you been doing on your high horses these days?

3. This is a minor point, but Gawker’s Creative Commons license clearly states that it’s “freely revocable” — and very much less clearly states whether or not it applies to all of Gawker Media’s original content or simply the Kinja output made by users availing themselves of the company’s “Services.” There’s no “funny thing” here, I’m afraid. Thiel can do exactly what he thinks he can do and exactly what people are afraid of.

I hate being caught “mad online,” but really, you guys, please be smarter about this. It’s an actual threat to democratic values and freedom of the press.

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(I had to create a new BBS account, since mine lapsed due to inactivity. New users can only deploy two links, so while I would have liked to put in more supporting citations, I instead had to resort to a level of detail that made the facts easier to search for online.)

The main gawker site was mostly an internet rag. I liked a lot of the sub-gawker sites like jalopnik , IO, gizmodo, deadspin, etc. Those are still around, under gizmodo.

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Hmm. 105 articles by and mentions of Gawker in my index. That’s going to leave a hole. Yeah, I’ll be pissed off.

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Those people are wrong. Gawker’s death was suicide by hubris.

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no such thing as power or not about it, power is from human selvx

What libertarianism means is that, since he’s a private citizen, the government can’t stop him from suppressing any speech he can pay to suppress. The dirty maybe-not-so-secret truth about libertarianism, is it’s just another way for the strong to step on the necks of the weak.

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Isn’t libertarianism just rebranded feudalism? So those quotation mark don’t need to be there.

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Wow. Expressed so much better than I could. That’s Bertrand Russell for you…

Not in it’s original sense as a socialist belief (as in what it meant 60+ years ago). Maybe that name is a lost battle, but it’s still worth remembering that the ‘Libertarian’-capitalists ‘evicted’ the socialists who called themselves libertarian first. Their first act was identity theft. Everything else they have done makes sense after that.

Don’t forget, even a dictator protects their own liberty. It’s how you treat other people that really matters.

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