“It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence”, Thiel told the newspaper. Zuckerberg wrote that he “found the comments deeply upsetting, and they do not represent the way Facebook or I think at all”.
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“Issues of independence in media are key to democracy”, Sandberg said during an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher onstage.
In the suit he funded for Hogan, the wrestler won the case with a Florida judge ordering Gawker to pay $140million for the invasion of his privacy, but the website is now in the process of appealing the decision.
Despite the $140 million award in the Bollea case, Denton said the company is “pretty confident” a higher court will rule in its favor or reduce the verdict on appeal. The company is appealing.
Commenting on Thiel’s accusations that Gawker is a bully, Denton told CBS’ “This Morning” program, “I think it’s a little rich for somebody worth $2.7 billion who spent a portion of their fortune [to try to destroy Gawker] to describe anyone else as a bully”.
Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said board member Peter Thiel is bankrolling lawsuits against Gawker Media LLC based on his own personal convictions, and his support doesn’t affect his role at Facebook. “We recently engaged [Houlihan Lokey Managing Director] Mark Patricof to advise us and that seems to have stirred up some excitement, when the fact is that nothing is new”.
But my more considered reaction is that it’s actually pretty hard to establish a principle which protects important speech, but not the publication of the Hulk Hogan tape.
Audience member Josh Topolsky, a tech journalist who cofounded The Verge, pointed out that Thiel could be secretly funding other lawsuits against other media companies, and asked if that would compel Facebook to sever ties. In a statement, he said Gawker had “built its business on humiliating people for sport”.
Ezra Klein, editor-in-chief of the news site Vox.com, said that “even if Gawker was wrong to post those articles, Thiel’s method of reprisal is risky”.
After the revelation of Thiel’s involvement, major media from The New York Times to the New Yorker sounded the alarm about the risky precedent this could set: Anyone with deep pockets and a grudge, they warned, could wreak havoc on any journalistic enterprise.
Entrepreneur Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, hasn’t simply admitted to financing a litigation campaign meant to destroy a widely read news site – Gawker – he has bragged about it. Journalists invade folks’ privacy all the time – that’s sort of our job – and drawing lines about whose privacy may be invaded, and when, is not easy for people with a strong commitment to free speech norms.
Financial journalist Felix Salmon wrote on the website Fusion that Thiel “just gave other billionaires a unsafe blueprint for perverting philanthropy”. “Funding lawsuits secretly; special goal vehicles; offshore accounts; whatever it is, they can exercise power very discreetly”.
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Mr. Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post newspaper, said public officials need a thick skin because they will always have critics. German-born Thiel was a founder of the online payments firm PayPal, and served as its CEO before it was sold to eBay.
