jdreyer wrote on Aug 24, 2016, 07:43:

Beamer wrote on Aug 23, 2016, 21:38:

nin wrote on Aug 23, 2016, 21:00:

Some questions for those who are cheering Gawker's demise.

Another great example of this is the Las Vegas Review Journal. When people with money silence the news, everyone loses...

Gawker.com was terrible. It had terrible articles, far worse than even the Hogan one.

But what Thiel did was worse. He isn't the only billionaire trying to use unrelated court cases for revenge (Mother Jones had it happen, too), and Gawker isn't the only site he's been going after.

It's always so weird to me that the freedom of speech troops aren't realizing that billionaires using unrelated cases to punish websites for perfectly valid stories (though Gawker's about Thiel was very shitty) will just silence people by making them think twice about what they say about billionaires.

Gawker.com dying isn't bad. The other sites will live, though anyone else laid off is absolutely bad. Cheering on a billionaire silencing a media corporation through an unrelated court case in which he manipulated the plaintiff, simply because you dislike the reviews one site writes about your favorite video game, though...

Jeez Beamer, the courts ruled the tape protected speech, but Theil kept attacking. Gawker dying is bad, even if did have some questionable stories. Gawker did good work too, and all those people who lost their jobs didn't deserve to. This will just embolden plutocrats into attacking more and more, and will have a chilling effect on journalists. This was classic SLAPP tactics by Thiel, but because he used proxies, he's safe? This isn't how it should have turned out, and we should all be worried. No good came from this at all.

I agree with you, I'm trying to temper my argument before certain usual suspects come in and start accusing me of always defending the media and hating free speech and being an SJW and blah blah blah.

We can discuss how terrible Thiel's actions were, but people will always try to spin it to how terrible Gawker was, and I was trying to take that argument away before it was used, because it isn't relevant.

Not to mention, again, most of those "free speech" types hate Gawker solely because they have some weird misguided anger at Kotaku for things Kotaku didn't even do.