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Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

nytimes.com

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Re: Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

#51

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

zardgiv wrote: post #10
pkinsky wrote: post #4

>He added: “It’s not for me to decide what happens to Gawker. If America rallies around Gawker and decides we want more people to be outed and more sex tapes to be posted without consent, then they will find a way to save Gawker, and I can’t stop it.” An important reminder of exactly what conduct, on Gawker's part, people are defending. They have no moral high ground, noble principles, or higher purpose. They're scum…

As long as we're quoting someone with an obvious vested interest, how do you feel about what Gawker points to: "Hillary Clinton’s secret email account, Bill Cosby’s history with women, the mayor of Toronto as a crack smoker, Tom Cruise’s role within Scientology, the N.F.L. cover-up of domestic abuse by players and just this month the hidden power of Facebook to determine the news you see.” It's not so cut and dry, wh…

Just because they published things that have been good journalism allows them carte blanche to publish things that break the law and are morally reprehensible? I find this logic baffling.

Re: Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

#52

Post by MBCook »

hackaflocka wrote: post #46
madeofpalk wrote: post #16

Josh Marshall, from John Gruber: It all comes down to a simple point. You may not like Gawker. They’ve published stories I would have been ashamed to publish. But if the extremely wealthy, under a veil secrecy, can destroy publications they want to silence, that’s a far bigger threat to freedom of the press than most of the things we commonly worry about on that front. If this is the new weapon in the arsenal of the…

Gawker proudly published Hulk Hogan's sex tape (while shaming him for it), while also shaming websites for publishing J.Law's nudes. I can't see anything redeeming about such an inconsistency: http://imgur.com/gallery/CQ5qgvu

And they owned ValleyWag which tried to out Thiel as gay.

Re: Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

#53

Post by eudox »

zardgiv wrote: post #45
darawk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It is always ok to finance a lawsuit. The premise of our legal system is that optimal adversaries debating in front of an impartial judge produce the best possible outcome. If Hogan wasn't able to finance the lawsuit on his own, that would be the perversion of justice. But if our court system operates as it should, and there is no indication to my knowledge that it has not in this case, then billionaires funding…

It's not to say that this is what happened here, but our legal system disagrees that it's always OK to finance a lawsuit (see SLAPP).

Certainly, but a characteristic of SLAPP is the plaintiff hasn't got a solid case, their purpose is to drag legal procedures long enough to bankrupt their target.

Hulk Hogan won this lawsuit fair and square.

Re: Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

#54

Post by madeofpalk »

aeb0 wrote: post #41
shard972 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man John is just a little dramatic sometimes. Financing a lawsuit which so far seems to be legitimate under US law is equated with destroying publications? The fact that gawker is online after losing the trial pretty much illustrates the point.

Because they are appealing the award. The 147M or whatever it is is thought to be enough to wipe them out, which would be no great loss.

Mind you, Gawker is the organisation that revealed the Facebook Trending News... 'scandal'.

Re: Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

#55

Post by pkinsky »

zardgiv wrote: post #45
darawk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It is always ok to finance a lawsuit. The premise of our legal system is that optimal adversaries debating in front of an impartial judge produce the best possible outcome. If Hogan wasn't able to finance the lawsuit on his own, that would be the perversion of justice. But if our court system operates as it should, and there is no indication to my knowledge that it has not in this case, then billionaires funding…

It's not to say that this is what happened here, but our legal system disagrees that it's always OK to finance a lawsuit (see SLAPP).

That is not true. Our legal system views some lawsuits as themselves being illegitimate attempts to silence people by forcing them to defend against frivolous, meritless lawsuits (see SLAPP). It does not view lawsuits as SLAPP-worthy merely because based on who's paying the bill.

Re: Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

#56

Post by zardgiv »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #51
zardgiv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as we're quoting someone with an obvious vested interest, how do you feel about what Gawker points to: "Hillary Clinton’s secret email account, Bill Cosby’s history with women, the mayor of Toronto as a crack smoker, Tom Cruise’s role within Scientology, the N.F.L. cover-up of domestic abuse by players and just this month the hidden power of Facebook to determine the news you see.” It's not so cut and dry, wh…

Just because they published things that have been good journalism allows them carte blanche to publish things that break the law and are morally reprehensible? I find this logic baffling.

I was directly replying to the comment that "They have no moral high ground, noble principles, or higher purpose." Actually reading the context would make the logic much less baffling.

Re: Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

#57

Post by flashman »

zardgiv wrote: post #3
johansch wrote: post #2

This is commendable. Gawker is scum.

His stated goal, "deterrence," is the exact thing people talk about when they worry about a chilling effect. The fact that people are applauding because it's someone they disagree with whose ox is getting gored is really disappointing for a community that espouses such strong freedom of speech principles.

Good; there SHOULD be a chilling effect on publishing private material of the sort being litigated. There's a difference between 'what the public is interested in' and 'the public interest'.

Re: Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

#58

Post by nikcub »

darawk wrote: post #24
madeofpalk wrote: post #16

Josh Marshall, from John Gruber: It all comes down to a simple point. You may not like Gawker. They’ve published stories I would have been ashamed to publish. But if the extremely wealthy, under a veil secrecy, can destroy publications they want to silence, that’s a far bigger threat to freedom of the press than most of the things we commonly worry about on that front. If this is the new weapon in the arsenal of the…

This is a poorly thought out argument. He isn't doing anything under-handed or illegal to destroy Gawker. He isn't fabricating evidence against them or paying off cops. He's simply financing a non-spurious lawsuit, which the courts have decided was legitimate. This is exactly what I want the billionaires in our society doing. He may be acting in his own self-interest, but it also happened to align with the public int…

He isn't only funding lawsuits - but is asking to be judged by the standard of a philanthropist who supports libertarian values, freedom of the press and justifies his actions against Gawker as so.

That part is clearly bullshit.

Re: Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

#59

Post by MBCook »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #13
mrep wrote: post #9

Bad policy. If you don't like what they are doing based on moral grounds, then use your money and influence to educate people on why what they are doing is bad. That has a better chance of stomping out this problem for good. Taking a vendetta like this by trying to sue them out of business is just playing whack a mole. Another company will rise out of their ashes.

You might as well be educating Russian malware spammers on why emailing people phishing scams and keyloggers is wrong. We could get some ethics professors to write a monograph on the subject; maybe that would enlighten them.

Crud. Sorry for the accidental down vote.

Re: Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker

#60

Post by tomhoward »

nefitty wrote: post #14

Thiel claims to despise "massive privacy violations" on the part of groups like Gawker, yet he was one of the co-founders of Palantir. These people are just narcissists who want revenge for someone splashing mud on their boots. They're not fighting for our privacy, or for the common good. Sorry buddy, you are worth more than 99.999% of us. That makes you a significant figure and thus newsworthy. Your sexual orientati…

There's no evidence that this is motivated by his own "outing" as gay. It's not as if he was concealing it, and he's smart enough to have known that it would become public knowledge as his profile grew.

As he says in this interview, he's big and powerful enough to defend himself.

What he's fighting is the practice of destroying the reputations or lives of people who don't have the power to defend themselves, and claiming "free speech" as a justification for operating without any sense of morality and compassion.

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