Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

Gawker wasn't just an ordinary media voice that simply made the mistake of offending economically powerful people. In Apple's case, it paid a significant amount of money for a prototype iPhone that it absolutely knew was stolen. In Thiel's case, it outed a gay man that didn't want to come out. The earlier act was illegal; both acts are immoral.

I have real problem with Apple's cooperation with China, the total lack of documentation for developers, the faulty keyboards, the locking down of the App Store and total ban on sideloaded apps. I also have a big problem with the security stuff it builds in that can be (and most likely is) used for domestic spying. I want to run Linux on the M1 MacBook Pro. I think Scott Forstall should be brought back into the CEO role to replace Tim Cook. So don't get me wrong, my position is not reflexively pro-Apple or pro-Cook here.

I'm just saying that Gawker is just about the worst possible example to use. Does their point even stand at all without Gawker?

That's the thing about free speech and press freedom, you are either for it or against it. The fact that you or I find Gawker's output distasteful is irrelevant.

On the illegallity point, that is a job for law enforcement, not corporations to decide.

It's a bit unrealistic to expect your victims to lionize you in a television show.

If it was having a person having to make a television show about someone they hated then I would agree, but corporations are _not_ people and so the reasoning does not apply.

It is absolutely a corporation's job to decide where it will spend its money.

Cook didn't stop someone else making a show about Gawker, he stopped the company he runs from doing so. Huge difference.

Quite right: Apple is entitled to make (and not make) whatever products it chooses.

Could’ve made a great, and timely, horrible-warts-n-all show about freedom of speech and those who’d manipulate it, but Cook is not one for such exuberant boldness. Hey, I’m fine with that: last thing I want is a desire to spend any more money on their overpriced tat.

Guess it’s The People vs Larry Flynt for movie night tonight. Now where did I put the DVD…

>Cook didn't stop someone else making a show about Gawker

Yet. We are talking about Apple, which is blocking Microsoft's xCloud and Google's Stadia on iOS on the grounds that Microsoft and Google are not submitting each individual game for review. Both xCloud and Stadia are just glorified video players, where you are streaming video of a game being played in a server room and sending back controls. If streaming video game video can be subject for individual approval on iOS, I don't see streaming TV shows being subject to individual review that far off.

Free press doesn't mean you can slander people or publish intimate details about them without them having a civil case against you.

Anyone can sue anyone pretty much, that's what a free country is about.

It's not the government shutting down gawker, it's people who have money to sue them. If you think that's wrong then the government needs to change libel laws, that's easy. Similar to the section 230 issues right now, with enough political pressure you can change things.

But gawker, they were asking for trouble, and got it. There's a reason lawyers recommend you don't do stuff that they did, and have done for decades if not centuries.

It is painfully ironic if you think that “freedom of speech” means that no one can make any judgements whatsoever about any properties of any speech, except, of course, the government.

The judiciary to be precise.

False dichotomy; you as individual are perfectly in your right to feel like certain speech or press should be constrained (think hate speech, fake news).

Freedom of speech is both a right and a responsibility. You are free to say what you want but you are also responsible for it. If you lie, slander, etc to make a profit then you should pay in some way. Tbh I don’t understand how people like Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson get away with so much. Much of it blatant making things up / lying about people.

Being wrong shouldn't be illegal. If it was, news would not exist.

That's why good news organisations a) fact check and b) are careful to differentiate between fact and opinion

As both of these protect you from defamation claims.

Being intentionally and maliciously wrong ... crosses multiple thresholds that merely being mistaken, confused, or mislead by sources does not.

Credible media acknowledge their errors. The goal is seeking truth, not achieving perfection.

Zero-tolerance for error is the worst form of censorship.

Most of politics involves creative and/or innovative interpretations of the truth. While in theory it would be an improvement to purge all the liers, in practice it is rare to get a substantial majority (60%+) of people to agree that an obvious lie is in fact a lie. And rarely because they have been mislead, one might suspect.

It really isn't. It is emphatically not legal to say whatever you want.

Also important to note that Gawker was hosting revenge porn and defied a court order to remove the content, which is what ultimately brought them down

> Gawker announced that it would not comply with the part of the court order requiring the removal of the post and associated commentary because it deemed the order "risible and contemptuous of centuries of First Amendment jurisprudence." Gawker removed the video itself, but linked readers to another site hosting the video

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker

>That's the thing about free speech and press freedom, you are either for it or against it.

You can have a balance of press freedom and privacy of individuals, and even the US does in libel and slander laws, as well as e.g. (more recently) revenge porn legislation.

Germany and other does European nations for example have a stronger claim to personal privacy rights of individuals than the US, based on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The European Court of Human Rights found that you cannot just publish any picture or piece of information you know but have to weigh the newsworthiness of information against the invasion of privacy such publication would mean.

E.g. paparazzos stalking somebody to a funeral of a family member is usually not newsworthy enough to overcome the personal right to privacy. Writing about somebody being gay would cross a line unless that somebody was/is publicly vocal about "gay matters" such as gay marriage legislation, gay adoption rights etc. Publishing pics of the family, especially kids, of famous people is usually a no go - except when those family members themselves engage in newsworthy activity such as coming a crime.

As it pertains to Gawker, they outed at least two high profile people as gay (Thiel, Cook), published a sex tape of Hulk Hogan and his partner, published nude paparazzo pics of various people including Justin Bieber and a slew of other things, while their sister site jezebel.com wrote pieces rather strongly condemning the publication of hacked nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence and other in the "fappening". If only Gawker listened to Jezebel...

Frankly, I like the European way, which is certainly not free of dangers, a lot better than the US way. But famous people are people too, and are entitled to at least some privacy.

You can have a balance of press freedom and privacy of individuals, and even the US does in libel and slander laws, as well as e.g. (more recently) revenge porn legislation.

The issue here, though, is not whether Gawker's behavior should have been protected speech, but whether it's concerning for a documentary about Gawker to be canned by a studio controlled by a large company which had another aspect of its business harmed by the behavior of the subject of that documentary.

Media should not be controlled by large entities but you can't say free speech for documentary producers but not for owners.

Deciding not to continue the documentary is Apple's right to free speech.

If anything you can push for legislators to apply anti monopoly laws to media and have companies split off.

Apple has that right. But sometimes the way rights are exercised can still be concerning to others.

I agree. Short of regulating quasi-monopolies/antitrust and illegal content, media companies - regardless of their size - shouldn't be interfered with. If Apple pays to produce content, then Apple can decide to stop paying or shelf it (in accordance with any contracts they entered).

To me, Apple's own streaming offering - which at least for now has sizable competition from giants such as Disney and Netflix and Amazon as well as small producers on youtube and elsewhere - is quite different from "social media" companies with their defacto "marketplaces of ideas" interfering with legal free speech of regular people, which I see with far more concern. It is also quite different to their quasi monopolist walled garden otherwise known as the App Store.

Apple really is just a minor player in the TV space right now, and far more concerning is the Disney/Fox/Hulu behemoth, where we're slowly heading into antitrust territory.

> I'm just saying that Gawker is just about the worst possible example to use.

What left me puzzled for a while is that I automatically assumed the series would portray Gawker in a negative light, given how they operated. For Tim Cook to intervene, the opposite must have been the case, or am I missing something?

I saw it more as not wanting to hire/ give royalties to people you don’t like. “These people wronged me, don’t hire them”.

That said, seems morally upright compared to typical stories of blackballing in the entertainment industry.

>I think Scott Forstall should be brought back into the CEO role to replace Tim Cook.

I am glad I am not the only one. This is the same as Intel pushing out Pat Gelsinger. The product people get pushed out by sales and marketing. Which are increasingly running the show at Apple.

> I'm just saying that Gawker is just about the worst possible example to use.

Gawker is like a Rorschach test for how you think about these types of things.

> the total lack of documentation for developers

I suppose you aren't an Apple developer.

It's weird to see how The Times goes to bat for Gawker. They were absolute dregs of the media world that occasionally stumbled onto something hot and relevant. Is this wistful remembrance journalists circling the wagons, or is this guy actually serious?

Also Gawker (the company though, not the specific blog) caused "Gamergate"

If I remember correctly, when Zoe Quinn boyfriend complained about her behaviour, and accused her of having a relationship with an editor of Kotaku (that is property of Gawker), while her game was being reviewed by Kotaku, the reaction by Kotaku and Gawker at first was deny that it was an issue, leading to the shitstorm on twitter (since people were already pissed with media for other reasons, like Doritogate adn whatnot).

Only after things were already a huge mess, with death threats, trolls, people arrested (a Brazillian guy got arrested for sending death threats as a form of trolling, he had nothing to do with any of the groups involved, just wanted to watch the world burn), that Gawker did something about it. (sadly I don't remember what exactly they did, and do not have time to check now, but was something along the lines admit that editors having conflict of interest is a bad thing)

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