Peter Thiel Has Been Funding Hulk Hogan's Lawsuits Against Gawker | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel Has Been Funding Hulk Hogan's Lawsuits Against Gawker

forbes.com

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gawker put tesla on a death watch. they exploited their struggle and heartbreak, their endeavour to make the world a better place, for clicks. they hosted a video of hulk hogan having sex on their website despite him not wanting them to. maybe people dont realize just how fucked up that is because people tend to dehumanize celebrities. these are not journalists. these people are fucking scum. good riddance. the fact that a billionaire funded hogans case doesnt bother me at all. it reminds me more of bill gates funding malaria research than anything. another parasite wiped out for the betterment of humanity.

all the people saying this is creepy because its a billionaire shutting down journalism -- dont make me laugh. these werent journalists. and they sealed their own doom by doing things that were not only mean and cruel but super illegal. they did this to themselves. hogan was going to win that case no matter what.

i would have donated to his case given the opportunity.

Is Gawker the root of the problem, or a symptom of a larger one? Perhaps the problem is that people will ingest and internalize information from anywhere, without putting it through any sort of critical-thinking funnel. They let themselves become so convinced of something they read on gawker, that they actually try to convince other people it's true.

To put it another way: sure, good riddance to gawker. But what's to stop its successor? You may not like gawker, and your reasons may be valid, rational, or even altruistic. But you cannot dictate the will of its audience. What gives anyone, government or otherwise, the right to stop information at its source?

If you want to lessen the power of information, regardless of how "right" you think it is, the best way to invest your time or money is into teaching people how to think critically, and also why to think critically. Unfortunately it's quite difficult to teach on that subject when you're silencing an opinion from one side of your mouth, and preaching critical thinking from the other.

I think you can silence the opinion of fuckwits like Gawker without losing the ability to teach critical thinking.

In fact, the silence might be better for studying.

The central tenet of critical thinking is to question everything. Why bother questioning anything, if you just saw your teacher shut down a source of information without giving you the opportunity to ask your own questions about its motives?

Gawker is a "source of information" like chlamydia is to the common cold.

Nothing is lost in the destruction of a source of bile about individuals and their private lives, it was zero-information content in the first place. To posit Gawker as a "worthwhile source" indicates a lack of critical thinking to begin with.

Or, I reject one of your primary premises and think you're drawing a connection to "information being stifled" that is tenuous at best given the nature of the information and the behavior of Gawker as an organization. I also disagree with the implied slippery slope on the grounds that the content being "stifled" was bile about individuals in their personal lives and devoid of artistic, journalistic, or any other praise or protection.

tldr: Fuck Gawker.

"What gives anyone, government or otherwise, the right to stop information at its source?"

The overwhelming majority of the electorate who believe that information is powerful and that people should be held responsible for misusing it in certain limited situations.

I don't think anyone is silencing Gawker. Nobody is shutting it down. They did something illegal, so they must pay for it.

The consequence of the lawsuit is a fine. Gawker shutting down may be a consequence of the fine, but it is not the lawsuit's objective.

> What gives anyone, government or otherwise, the right to stop information at its source?

Defamatory falsehoods can sometimes be stopped by the government at its source.

Protecting individual privacy is an increasingly serious issue in the age of mass communication and smartphones.

Finally, the State routinely classifies information deemed sensitive to national security and foreign relations.

(ps upvoted for presenting such a clear and reasonable argument for me to disagree with)

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Bronz, I assume you are serious. You could claim that every time the NY Times writes an article about a tragedy, they are taking advantage of it. Showing someone having sex who doesn't want that to be public is awful. But trying to get clicks (and get money from advertisers who pay per click) is little different than newspapers, in my opinion. It's a higher goal to try to inform, but in the end you are both selling advertising (and the subscription).

i mean, there is indeed a trend in the news industry today to exploit tragedies for ad money. im not ok with that either. but obviously gawker took exploitation to an entirely other level which is the source of my outrage.

Not just hosted the video but then refused to take it down when a judge ordered them to

(Reposting here since I'm not sure which submission on new is going to "win")

Sure does make this line in Thiel's Wikipedia page a bit awkward: "The Thiel Foundation is also a supporter of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which promotes the right of journalists to report the news freely without fear of reprisal" Oh, but I'm sure this wasn't reprisal against Gawker (and specifically Valleywag, which was always extremely critical of libertarian VC techbros in general and Thiel in particular), he was just so moved by the plight of a pro wrestler suffering immensely from a leaked sex tape.

Look, I'll get out in front of people accusing me of bias and just say it: I've always hated Thiel. I hate his politics, the behavior of several of the companies he founded, and his smarmy "drop out of college!" advice. But even if you don't share my bile, you should be deeply disturbed by the fact that at least one Silicon Valley billionaire is talking about freedom and innovation with one side of his mouth, while using his money to try and destroy insufficiently sycophantic press outlets. We're moving ever-closer to a world where our industry leaders are not very distinguishable from 19th century robber barons (maybe not to you, but increasingly to the general public)

Look, I sort of get where you're coming from but this wasn't exactly Snowden here.

Please do not equate publishing the sex tape of an unwitting victim with freedom of the press... or Gawker bloggers with journalists, for that matter.

I don't agree or disagree with your statements about Thiel as I don't know enough about him to form an opinion, but Gawker seems to very clearly be in the wrong here. If Thiel in any way helped justice to be served here, for whatever motive, good on him.

> but Gawker seems to very clearly be in the wrong here

That's not really relevant to my point. Even if Gawker was completely wrong to do what they did, why did Thiel pick that case to donate to? Plenty of people file lawsuits just as valid as Hulk Hogan's every day. Or why didn't he file an amicus curiae? This is clearly an attempt to destroy press he has a grudge against, which is alarming even if the specific lawsuit he picked was a valid one and the defendants were "Gawker bloggers". Look at the bigger picture.

I am looking at the bigger picture, and what I see is that those who wield extraordinary power, whether it be financial, political or otherwise, rarely use it purely in defense of the 'greater good.' However, sometimes their pragmatism serves it by coincidence and I'm willing to celebrate when that happens.

The Hulk Hogan case must have hit a ratio of how much money would Thiel have put up vs probability of success and damage to Gawker. Having a sex tape made and leaked without permission is an easy win.

And why would Thiel file an amicus curiae? He can pay for Hulk's lawyer and if the case is thrown out, Thiel does not get outed as Hulks sponsor. If he wins, he might get a portion of the money, which most likely will not happen, but most importantly he gets to crush an enemy.

It doesn't matter. You don't need logical certainty("If you violate the law, you will be punished"), just some statistical possibility("If you violate the law, there's a small chance you might be punished").

The small chance that someone somewhere might file a lawsuit against you could be enough to frighten future Gawkers, which protects even the small-time people who can't afford their own lawsuits.

And if some Gawker executive says to himself, "Let's do a risk assessment on this person to see if he's likely to get outside support to fight back." Well, there's now the risk of leaving a paper trail demonstrating intent.

You're right that this lawsuit will have the positive effect of causing people to be less likely to publish sex tapes.

But it will also have the negative effect of causing news companies to be constantly afraid of publish anything negative about a rich person, because that person might secretly fund lawsuits against them. Gawker is being sued for 2 other things besides this.

But this is nothing new, and not even an especially blatant example of it, since Hogan had an excellent case, and Thiel had personal reasons to sympathize with him (as opposed to economic or other self-serving reasons).

Remember the SCO saga? There are much, much worse examples of legal harassment via strawmen already, so this won't make the media any more afraid than they already have reason to be. Unless possibly in the area of publicizing sex videos without consent.

They apparently crossed several legal boundaries in publishing what they did and were blatantly unrepentant about it. I hardly see requiring news companies to follow the law to be something to be unhappy about.

That aside, the wealthy and powerful have always had more influence than ordinary people. Why are people surprised about that?

Especially when you consider that Hogan dropped the part of the suit that would have allowed Gawker to use their insurance to pay some of the liability claim.

Odd, when you consider it shrunk dramatically the ability for Gawker to be able to pay the claim ($144M... Gawker only had $35M in revenue) - is the goal to be recompensed for damages, or to destroy Gawker? The latter seems much more likely, and chilling. Especially if you have a billionaire secret backer.

Well apparently Thiel bankrolled several suits against Gawker, so...

Well, according to Thiel himself, he supported this case and apparently some others because he felt that these were people who had been wronged by Gawker, and had insufficient resources to mount a proper case on their own.

If this is true and you still think it's a problem then it's a problem when ACLU picks and chooses which cases to support, too.

Of course, you can impugn his motives, and say he's just interested in seeing Gawker burn out of spite. Many have also impugned ACLU's motives. But I'm inclined to believe them both, because their explanations for why they support who they do make sense to me.

From a moral standpoint, I think they were wrong to do what they did. But, from a legal standpoint, many lawyers will tell you the ruling was a pretty terrible one.

And when you look at the size of the judgement against Gawker ($140M) it's a bit of a stretch to say that justice was done.

They have ignored a direct court order telling them to take down the article. You reap what you sow.

I'm liking this argument that "gawker bloggers aren't journalists" so much that it seems to negate the contradiction of Thiel preaching press-freedom yet financing lawsuits against a press outlet.

Of course, factoring out my biases, this is troubling. But who is foolish enough to think that this sort of thing doesn't happen in tech? Most of the big names got there through backstabbing

Journalists aren't a special class. Freedom of the press either belongs to everyone, or its a tool of tyranny and elite oppression rather than freedom.

You can argue that what Gawker has done is outside the scope of press freedom, but not that there is some group of individuals to whom press freedom is unavailable.

it might be awkward if gawker or valleywag staffed journalists.

It's great when you define journalism as "thing I agree with." Powerful concept of press freedom there!

i never defined journalism as something i agree with. not here or anywhere else.

You understand Gawker outed Peter Thiel as gay about 9 years ago, right?

What comes around, goes around.

A celebrity sex tape distributed without permission is not news.

This is another one of those situations you can excuse away through specific context (Valleywag did plenty of crappy things) but the broader play here is worrying: billionaire finances lawsuits he has nothing to do with, in order to take down media entity that he dislikes.

I try not to think about the specifics and look at the broader precedent something like this sets and... erk.

EDIT: all specifics aside, I think what bothers me most is that he can do this in secret. We only found out because of, wait for it, the media. Maybe he'll fund cases against Forbes next?

Devil's Advocate: If the court system is presumed to be functional here, billionaire is funding a just outcome that could not otherwise come to pass.

That feels like a big presumption. The court system often seems to operate on a "biggest pockets wins" basis.

Bigger pockets than Gawker Media? Gawker was very easily able to afford its own defense - it's the damages they couldn't afford.

Can you explain how the bigger pockets dictated the Bollea outcome? It looked like the just outcome to me.

> Bigger pockets than Gawker Media?

Er, yes. Billionaire Peter Thiel has considerably bigger pockets than Gawker Media.

But that's not really my point, I was talking in general terms. The court system is not reliable enough that it will always find the right outcome no matter what.

If one side can afford a decent lawyer and the other can't, sure, the money probably makes a big difference. If one side can afford a great lawyer and the other can only afford a decent lawyer, maybe. If both sides can afford great lawyers... are there amazing lawyers who are that much better than great lawyers? It seems to me like, beyond a certain point, having deeper pockets wouldn't really make a difference, and the case would be determined on ... its merits, and the choice of judge, and the choice of jury, and possibly other considerations. Well, the point is, it wouldn't be the money.

Idunno, with the law as complex as it is, and with civil procedure being as complex as it is, it seems like there is so much room to grow as a lawyer that I'm sure they have a similar 10x distinction, as in programming

Media can also corrupt the courts. Have you seen "Making a Murderer?"

Just as it seems it corrupts public opinion. Have you read the facts behind the documentary that were very skewed in one direction?

I have. Unless there's something new in the last few months, they left some things out that might sway my opinion (slightly) about whether Avery actually committed a crime but nothing that would sway my opinion on how the system treated him and whether the police and attorneys involved were engaged in corruption. In fact based on additional readings I'd actually add "incompetent judges" to the list of government faults and failures.

If you want an example of how the civil court system can easily be subverted to harass people to malicious ends that are bad for society, just look no further than Scientology. Which is only one of the best of many examples.

There is nothing remotely precedent setting about what Thiel is doing here. Billionaires have long used courts to silence dissent [0][1].

[0] - http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vander... [1] - https://www.thestar.com/news/2007/06/11/steelback_ceo_sues_s...

This story has little to do with fairness and justice and everything to do with power. It's this shameless exercise of hidden power by a prominent member of the billionaire class that is deeply scary. When you discover someone with way too much power and accountable to no one wielding it, it can and should be terrifying.

It doesn't actually matter that much how much the victim of that power deserves it. This is a bad sign for our culture.

What happened was that power gave fairness and justice a chance.

The penalty was bizarrely sized considering the damages suffered. Companies regularly suffer less hurt from killing people.

They still have a chance to appeal the judgment.

The penalty was chosen after the defense did nearly everything possible to sabotage their own case and paint themselves in an unsympathetic light. It's rather telling that the jury awarded damages in excess of what the plaintiff asked for.

It doesn't set any broader precedent at all. Tycoons have been supporting or destroying news and media companies for more than a century, based on whim or bias or any number of reasons. There is absolutely nothing new or precedent setting about what Thiel is doing.

A billionaire taking down Gawker is no worse than the (formerly) billion dollar Gawker Media corporation taking down Terry Bollea. It's all ugly, and it's all meaningless in broader terms - other than potentially setting a positive precedent that companies like Gawker aren't allowed to violate a person's privacy the way they did.

At no point has Gawker Media ever been close to a billion dollar corporation.

They only did $40M -revenue- at peak.

I agree that the broader play is worrying, but "Billionaire finances lawsuit of another victim of assholes who tried to out him as gay" makes it very hard for me to be upset at the instance.

The generalisation of this instance scares the fuck out of me nonetheless.

What exactly is the broader precedent here? That media outlets shouldn't collaborate with sexual predators for profit?

If Gawker is allowed to do this then why shouldn't they be allowed to pay for a similar tape? Hell, if it's fair game they should be able to pay in advance. They could even have sexual predators on retainer :)

I'm not sure if you're being obtuse here, but the broader precedent is exactly what I outlined in my original post: that a billionaire can anonymously attack a media organisation he doesn't like.

Like I said, you can look at the specifics, like the sexual nature of this particular case, and make a judgement based on that, but I'm personally very wary of doing so. Especially when it involves sex, which is not an area any of us are particularly rational with.

I hate when people use the specifics! For instance, I was saying that the police shouldn't be allowed to arrest people. In fact, the state has no right to jail anyone.

Then, somebody came along and said, "In this case, they proved that he had murdered that person. And the murderer confessed on camera, too! In that case the state should be allowed to jail them."

And I was like, "What are you doing there, using specifics? My point is that, in general, the state shouldn't be allowed to jail anyone! Especially in general cases of murder, which few of us are familiar with."

Sigh.

There's relying on specifics, and there is abstracting ideas to such a broad point that the entire debate is meaningless. You and I both know there is a middle ground.

EDIT: eugh, forget it. I dislike how argumentative I end up being on HN. Such a waste of productive time. Overdue adding an entry to my hosts file...

> I'm not sure if you're being obtuse here, but the broader precedent is exactly what I outlined in my original post: that a billionaire can anonymously attack a media organisation he doesn't like.

I get your point. That is a valid broader context, but as I wrote above it is not the only one. Gawker is a media organization that gets away with attacking anyone whenever they want for any motive at all and are shielded from consequences by hiding behind their status as a "media organization" despite having no journalistic standards to speak of.

Which is worse, media organizations abusing people without the means or resources to fight back, or billionaires funding lawsuits against media organizations? You're imagining the danger of a billionaire with a personal vendetta against Gawker. I'm imagining staff writers at Gawker on power trips publishing hit pieces that barely toe the line of libel and getting normal people fired for clicks.

Class action lawsuits can cost lots of money and are frequently financed by investors. In a sense they're not much different than Silicon Valley startups.

And in the US the media has much more latitude than in many other countries, so it's a much riskier bet for a financier.

> This is another one of those situations you can excuse away through specific context (Valleywag did plenty of crappy things)

No, that is the broader context. Gawker being allowed to flagrantly abuse their first amendment rights to invade privacy for clicks is the broader context. They're the ones setting the precedent. If you truly care about the free exchange of ideas then you know that Gawker is the enemy. Someone had to stop them. The longer the system let them run amok violating every journalistic standard that ever existed, the worse the correction was going to be in the end. Precedent-wise, it could have been far, far worse.

They were "abusing their freedom of speech rights?"

That's a pretty narrow view of freedom of speech. Unsurprising, though, since it's an organization you disagree with. But I hope I'm not abusing my first amendment rights here...

> I hope I'm not abusing my first amendment rights here...

You aren't posting a sex tape of me without my permission, right?

I consider willful defamation to be an abuse of free speech rights, yes. Here is an example: https://archive.is/sGKOF

Biddle is protected either because he never technically lies or because Temkin might be considered a "Public Figure." But either way, Biddle's article is written explicitly to persuade a reader that Temkin is guilty of a specific crime in reckless disregard for the truth, and a significant amount of Temkin's status as a public figure derives from the accusation itself.

> since it's an organization you disagree with

In a world where media lies with moral hazard, individuals will have no choice but to pick sides.

But speaking of that, what's your opinion on the Jennifer Lawrence nudes? Is that free speech?

> the broader play here is worrying: billionaire finances lawsuits he has nothing to do with, in order to take down media entity that he dislikes.

Is it? I think it's a lot more worrying the fact that I can only have the protection of the law of if I have a lot of money. If a billionaire helps me with the bills, what's wrong with that?

Setting aside the specifics of this particular publisher (Valleywag) and their criticisms of Thiel, it's very disturbing that someone with deep pockets can work to secretly take out critical media like this.

How is it any different from the unlimited ways they can use their money to influence things? This is far less concerning than how lobbying works in the US, how polticians get paid absurd speaking fees by companies who benefit tremendously from said politcian, or how they can funnel unlimited amounts of money into super PACs to promote whatever candidate they want. They can buy entire media outlets and make their reporting biased in favor of whatever opinions they have.

Funding a valid, founded lawsuit against an entity they don't like is pretty far down the list of disturbing things for them to do with their money. This isn't even as bad as buying up patents and trolling companies for settlements which happens all the time.

Gawker took themselves out by putting a sex tape on their website without the consent of the people appearing in it. Perhaps Theil helped the process along, but he wouldn't have been able to do so if they hadn't been so reckless.

My perspective is this won't have a chilling effect on real journalism.

This, to me, simply re-iterates the ingrained expectations of conduct that journalism attempts to envelop and embrace as a profession. There are newsworthy stories, and there is muck raking. They are different, and on completely different ends of the integrity scale. Personally I like that the courts are a venue for recourse when there is perceived harm; sure, things could be improved mechanics wise but at least there's an attempt at "checks and balances" the way laws are written.

Here is something else Thiel financed

http://twitter.com/italkyoubored/status/730470870360203265

My estimation of him just dropped to a new low. How cruel.

Why would Thiel need to fund this lawsuit in the first place? Don't lawyers usually take cases with the potential for a multi-million dollar payoff on a contingency basis?

Edit: Apparently there's another rumor that the Hulkster refused a generous settlement from Gawker in favor of taking his chances at trial. If true, the Thiel rumor would make more sense.

Do good engineers take their salary entirely in equity? In both cases, despite high payoffs, there is extreme variability in outcome. Running a serious lawsuit is very expensive.

Taking large cases on contingency is exactly the business model of many law firms. They don't charge the client directly, and take about 50% of the payout, plus legal fees if the court awards it. The firms take on multiple cases at once so they can afford to lose some.

Accepting funding from an outside party reduces the risk of making nothing, but eliminates the big payoff. Most serious law firms wouldn't take that deal.

Was the firm in this case very small? That's the only way this rumor would make sense. Even then, why wouldn't Thiel just point the Hulkster to a big law firm that could handle the case without help?

He obviously has a personal vendetta against gawker. And hey, fair enough. They weren't exactly nice to him.

But then, tabloids aren't very nice to Hollywood celebrities either. Yet celebrities in Hollywood tolerate their detractors far more than Thiel even has to tolerate his.

“Valleywag is the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda,” - Peter Thiel, 2009.

Always playing the long game. Also nice 0-1 creative use of litigation court as investment vehicle and vessel for cultural change and constitutional rights all in one.

Oh that we could all live in a world where the most terroristic organisation in our lives is... Valleywag.

Is there a non-Forbes source? I'm not turning off my ad blocker.

It's on archive.is - http://archive.is/JK6N7

Here's how it looks to me:

A very big bully (Thiel) beating up a medium sized bulley (Gawker).

I hate bullies.

I'm betting it was Thiel himself who called the tip into Sorkin.

Dude, your most recent comments on HN are defending Moldbug. This puts to lie any free speech argument there, so just say you're happy because Gawker is a bunch of SJWs and move on.

I have no love for his political views (or even computing views, for the most part), but has Yarvis/Moldbug ever defamed someone or published private videos? If not, I don't see the hypocrisy.

Nah, he just talked about how some ethnic groups are genetically predisposed to being good slaves. Seems to be a weird set of priorities where that is deserving of free speech protection, but Gawker as an actual press organization needs to be silenced.

Dredging my comment history for rhetorical ammunition is rather creepy. I defended Moldbug's right to free speech because I saw no credible argument that he deserved to be punished for it.

I did get angry at the smugness of tptacek's dishonesty, which was obvious to me a priori. That was a moment of weakness on my part but has nothing to do with my choice to defend Moldbug, which I stand by until I am persuaded otherwise.

> so just say you're happy because Gawker is a bunch of SJWs and move on.

That is also true but I yet attempt to be objective and rational in the (rapidly dwindling) hope that reason and discourse will prevail over the coercion and dishonesty of culture warfare.

It's pretty clear that "objective and rational" is a cover for you to reinforce your existing beliefs, rather than any sort of critical thinking, but, hey, you do you.

All one can ever do is attempt to be objective and rational. I might have failed, but you certainly have not made a persuasive case, all you have done is fling poo.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11767613 and marked it off-topic.

Peter Thiel is a delegate for Trump. I for one welcome our new asshole billionaire overlords. They've meritocratically proven that they're better than us and they deserve it.

Good.

When people say the signal to noise ratio is bad, articles like this are in the "noise" side of the statement.

So are posts like yours (and this one for that matter)

I didn't expect to get downvoted so much. I never would have thought of Hacker News as the place to learn about a former celebrity, a sex tape, and the fact that the celebrity's friend helped pay for a lawsuit against an Internet-only tabloid (OMG!).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com