Hacker News Reader

Comment by whateveridunno | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think that while Gawker wasn't right to release the tape, fining them $115 million isn't right either. $115 million could easily sink Gawker entirely. I'm not exactly the biggest fan of the place but it's a dangerous precedent to set for press freedom if a single editor's single bad decision can take down an entire site.

Of course, the amount is likely to be revised down in appeals.

View on HN

They ignored a previous court injunction requiring them to take the video down and bragged about it. This should sink Gawker entirely.

That injunction was found unconstitutional by the appeals court.

While I respect that conclusion in general, I think that Gawker in particular has done a lot of sadistic and mean "reporting" which serves no public good. Them being sunk seems almost a public good in my opinion.

Indeed. The final straw for me was when they outed a Conde Nast exec, there was no scandal, no real story at all but they(Nick Denton) went ahead and destroyed this guy's life. You can read about it here:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/07/17/gawkers-appar...

I think $115 million is OK.

I agree. However, my- or anybody's- personal opinion of a place should have no bearing on whether our judicial system decides to take an independent media outlet down during a court case involving one man.

Let me put it this way: I don't care for Gawker and wouldn't mind personally if it sank (though there are good journalists there doing good work); I do care for the potential chilling effect this could have on other media.

(And let me make clear that I do think Bollea should have been compensated and Gawker punished, just not with $115 million.)

I realize this judgment was based only on this case, but from my perspective, this isn't a single bad decision, but the latest in a series of bad decisions. Gawker posted an entirely unsubstantiated prostitution allegation against a competitor's executive, from a source who said straight up (in the article Gawker published!) that he was going public to make good on a blackmail threat. [1] They posted a video of a young woman possibly being raped, and told her to "not make a big deal out of this" when she begged them to take it down. [2]

Gawker was 100% in the wrong to release this tape, and they've shown a pattern of seriously abusive behavior before now. Some of sites in the Gawker network have decent writers with some integrity, and I'll be sorry that if need to find new employment; but Gawker as an entity is too corrupt to be salvaged.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker#Cond.C3.A9_Nast_CFO_pro... [2] http://nypost.com/2016/03/11/blah-blah-blah-gawker-editor-bl...

"freedom" to post private sex tapes?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com