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BuzzFeed Unmasks Mastermind Who Urged Peter Thiel To Destroy Gawker (buzzfeed.com)
One day in 2011 a 26-year-old approached Peter Thiel and said "Look, I think if we datamined Gawker's history, we could find weak points that we could exploit in the court of law," according to the author of a new book. An anonymous reader quotes BuzzFeed News:
Peter Thiel's campaign to ruin Gawker Media was conceived and orchestrated by a previously unknown associate who served as a middleman, allowing the billionaire to conceal his involvement in the bankrolling of lawsuits that eventually drove the New York media outlet into bankruptcy. BuzzFeed News has confirmed the identity of that mystery conspirator, known in Thiel's inner circle as "Mr. A," with multiple sources who said that he provided the venture capitalist and Facebook board member with a blueprint to covertly attack Gawker in court. That man, an Oxford-educated Australian citizen named Aron D'Souza, has few known connections to Thiel, but approached him in 2011 with an elaborate proposal to use a legal strategy to wipe out the media organization. That plot ultimately succeeded... D'Souza was aware of Thiel's public comments likening Valleywag to al-Qaeda, and presented a brazen idea: Pay someone or create a company to hire lawyers to go after Gawker.
TechCrunch reported earlier this month that Gawker's old posts "will be captured and saved by the non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation," which was co-founded in 2012 by the late John Perry Barlow. But in addition, the Gawker estate "continues to threaten possible legal action against Thiel, and hopes to begin discovery to examine the billionaire's motivations for secretly funding his legal war," the article concludes. If a New York bankruptcy court approves, and if the process "unearths anything of meaning, the estate may have grounds to sue Thiel on the grounds of tortious interference, the use of legal means to purposely disrupt a business.
"To head that off, Thiel bid for the remaining Gawker assets -- including the flapship domain Gawker.com, its archive, and outstanding legal claims, like those against himself -- though Holden has made it known that he may block any sale to Thiel, no matter how much the venture capitalist is willing to bid."
TechCrunch reported earlier this month that Gawker's old posts "will be captured and saved by the non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation," which was co-founded in 2012 by the late John Perry Barlow. But in addition, the Gawker estate "continues to threaten possible legal action against Thiel, and hopes to begin discovery to examine the billionaire's motivations for secretly funding his legal war," the article concludes. If a New York bankruptcy court approves, and if the process "unearths anything of meaning, the estate may have grounds to sue Thiel on the grounds of tortious interference, the use of legal means to purposely disrupt a business.
"To head that off, Thiel bid for the remaining Gawker assets -- including the flapship domain Gawker.com, its archive, and outstanding legal claims, like those against himself -- though Holden has made it known that he may block any sale to Thiel, no matter how much the venture capitalist is willing to bid."
The same basic concerns are the same as at the beginning of this process. On the one hand, Gawker was terrible, and we haven't really lost much by losing them. On the other hand, a world where billionaires can functionally drive media sources into bankruptcy by proxy lawsuits is potentially incredibly chilling on free speech. And in the case of the Hulk Hogan lawsuit, the jury should at least have been made aware that Hogan was being bankrolled by Thiel (since it goes to Hogan's credibility and sincerity as a witness), although I imagine that that wouldn't have actually impacted that decision at all since Gawker's behavior was unambiguously terrible. But, a general rule that people should have to disclose in a lawsuit when they are being paid by someone else to run it isn't crazy.
Also the idea that Gawker didn't know why Thiel doesn't like them( as sort of implied in the summary) is ridiculous. Thiel doesn't like Gawker because they wrote articles outing him as gay and then repeatedly writing more articles with it in the headline: http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people.
Stop defending gawker. They were wrong and the courts agreed they were wrong. No one needed to "find weak points to exploit".
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Gawker deserves to be utterly destroyed. They've been on my shit list ever since the stunt that got the gizmodouches banned from CES, and I really wish Apple had landed some of them in jail when they stole that iPhone prototype and tried to destroy the career of the guy they stole it from.
Whatever else Thiel may do in his life, bringing an end to Gawker is something I will always thank him for.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
is there any link with a certain "Dinesh D'Souza" ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Which ever the masses follow...
Thank you for your contribution, Ivan.
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Show trials are a common thing in this world. They get the plaintiff publicity and sympathy to help them relaunch a career in show biz and the defendant sells papers/clicks. I suppose you could complain the courts shouldn't be used for this, but it's popular enough with the masses that it's allowed and it's mostly harmless. Gawker's mistake was not knowing Thiel was gunning for them. .
I keep saying this, but Theil didn't hate Gawker for outing him (he's a billionaire, at his level there are no consequences actual crimes let alone legal behavior), he hated them for writing stories about his shady business dealings. Gawker did a lot of tabloid journalism but they used it to fund a lot of real journalism; a tradition as old as journalism itself. What we old folk used to call muckracking.
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A tortious interference claim is for wrongful and improper actions. Funding a lawsuit can hardly be considered wrongful or improper. Close all the courthouses forever if it is.
Gawker's conduct was wrongful and improper. That's why they lost.
Also, in a bankruptcy you can't just decide not to sell to someone you’re prejudiced against. There's are legal responsibilities. If he bid the highest and has the most credible plan for the assets, it will be very hard to justify (in court) not selling them to him.
We've seen this play out before. Cult Awareness Network was legally "slapped" into bankruptcy by Scientology, which did not like the group's open explanations of Scientology's inner secrets to new members, or the exposure of the secrets about the god Xenu and how all your bad thoughts and inner demons are the rejoined souls or "thetans" of slaughtered citizens of the Galactic Federation, killed by a thermonuke dropped on Hawaii millions of years ago. So Scientology sued them to death with money from Lisa Marie Presley and bought up the assets, the name, the phone numbers, and the membership lists. If you call or see anything from Cult Awareness Network these days, it's a Scientologist answering the email or handling the phone who will guide you to the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard to solve your problems.
It's not that death by lawsuit does not have valid uses. But its a dangerous tool, one to think about carefully before using it.
No, not a spy, a paid troll. I'd never mistake you for a spy. It take balls to be a spy.
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Buzzfeed's not doing too well and they've got an IPO coming up.
https://www.inc.com/erik-sherm...
https://nypost.com/2017/03/29/...
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
That's not the point. The point is that if every rich asshole is capable to run a media company into the ground "just because", we are in deep trouble.
So far it’s only one media company — the one full of assholes that couldn't be bothered to follow any rules. It turned out that following at least one rule was important.
the Saudis would have moved against an American billionaire? You're simply not allowed to be that naive about how the world works. Laws apply differently to the ultra rich.
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Gawker didn't get run into the ground "just because". They committed corporate suicide by publishing Bollea's sex tape against his will then publishing an article gloating about how they were going to ignore the court order to take it down.
The Gawker court case narrowly avoided "money rules everything". If it was simply Bollea vs Gawker, then Bollea wouldn't have been able to get justice, Gawker could easily have outspent him. Thiel's involvement evened the playing field, making it possible for Bollea to get justice.
conflating the opinions of individuals (submitters and/or editors) with the "opinion" of the organization, 5 yards.
Apparently there are people who want to make sure he keeps spending. And spending.
So it's all good. He has lots of money, they should be able to keep him at it for years.
The "editors" have time to post Democrat Party propaganda but apparently no time to clean up all the vulgar flame comments.
Gawker knew what they were doing. It was a huge part of their job. Again, what they _didn't_ know is that Thiel was out for blood.
They didn't even know what the opposition wanted? Sounds to me like they didn't know what they were doing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
when a lawsuit was used to accomplish the deed? The fact remains that the American legal system was engaged to crush someone's speech. Yes, there's lots of extenuating circumstances here, but ultimately the sex tape isn't what got Gawker shut down, Peter Thiel did.
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The more you respond the more it costs the people paying for you, so be my guest.
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A lot of the repub idiots I know are finally realizing they've been had.
Spring should be Awesome this year...
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
because the opposition was actively hiding itself. Did you even RTFS much less TFA?
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Without Buzzfeed, how would we know about the weird tricks banks/manufacturers/service companies don't want you to know?
This is the country that thinks nothing of kidnapping a sitting prime minister of another country and forcing him to read a pre-written confession. If you were gay in the head-chopping capital of the word, you'd be shitting your pants if you got outed no matter how many billions you had, or how chummy Tim Cook is with some of the royals.
I'm aware of that bit of extreme weirdness involving Saudi Arabia & the PM of Lebanon.
It's curious that Hariri is a dual Saudi-Lebanese citizen.
But the Saudis consider themselves to be the power in the region, a title that only Iran has the power to dispute on an equal footing.
And the only Middle East nation whose leader gets to hold hands and play kissy-face with the POTUS.
They're not going to jeopardize that relationship just because they're offended that a very wealthy American who's willing to do business with them and is uncritical of their faith & politics and has political connections but prefers to go in through the out door.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Their faith and politics led to wealthy Saudi's (if not the Saudi government itself) funding the 9/11 attacks. And the consequence for that was....the U.S. went to war on Iraq and the people who offered to hand over Bin Laddin. So if you were a gay man suddenly outed - even a rich assed one - would be blase about it if you were in a country that funded 911, is virulently anti-gay, and chops people's heads off for sorcery? Or would you be offering the nearest cab driver thousands of dollars to get you to the American embassy, stat?
So if you were a gay man suddenly outed - even a rich assed one - would be blase about it if you were in a country that funded 911, is virulently anti-gay, and chops people's heads off for sorcery?"
Thiel's orientation was well known in his circles and Silicon Valley. It's naive to think that no one among the Saudi authorities had a clue, especially since he'd met with members of the royal family. And he continued to visit the kingdom even after being "outed". That's not what one would expect of someone afraid of being imprisoned, tortured or executed
Pain is merely failure leaving the body