Please make your substantive points without personal swipes like "Get a grip". Those aren't allowed here, because of the degree to which they poison discussion. Your comment would be fine without that bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thiel didn't destroy Gawker with a mercenary army. He financed a lawsuit which was found to be meritorious. This is not an "arbitrary" thing at all.

Whatever Thiel's beliefs or motives, Gawker published a private sex tape for no legitimate reason. When a judge ruled they had to take it down, they disobeyed the injunction.

As Thiel points out, one social problem that this exposes is that even a single digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan didn't have access to the legal system. Hogan should have been able to get the result himself, but needed a billionaire to finance him.

>Gawker reported on Weinstein at a time when other publications wouldn’t for fear of reprisal

They also created, hosted and pushed a "celebrity stalker map" for the express purposes of stalking people. There is a laundry list of reasons to have no sympathy for Gawker, and enough for many people to have wanted to see some comeuppance.

>We are not better off as a society when billionaires with histories of poor morality can arbitrarily destroy media companies.

We are better off when a company that goes too far, legally, faces ramifications for their actions. Even if the cause for those ramifications was less than pure; The motivations of the person who caused the action are kind of irrelevant to the action and result that occurred.

The worst part of this situation is not that Thiel funded someone else's lawsuit, but that access to justice required and requires that kind of funding. Not that Terry Bollea had his case handled without worry, but that everyone else does not.

He didn't arbitrarily destroy it, and other media companies are generally not in danger of the same fate as Gawker.

Gawker was exceptionally stupid both in their reporting and in court, joking (so they say) that they would post a sex tape of a child as long as it was over the age of four. That doesn't play well with jurors. They had no respect for any concept of personal privacy. We are absolutely better off as a society without them, and without any other media companies that behave in a similar shitty manner.

Being a media company is not and should not be a shield from civil lawsuits or prosecution. Media companies should be in danger of being sued to death if they behave as badly as Gawker did.

Everything Gawker did fell under the First Amendment, and so they should not be in danger of being sued to death if they behave as badly as Gawker did. The entire point of the Constitution is to protect essential liberties. Get rid of the Constitution, and we descend into an authoritarian state.

They violated his right to privacy. You don't get to use one right to violate another without consequences.

The First Amendment comes before all others, which is why it's first.

"Oh no, a politician said behind closed doors he's going to nuke COUNTRY! We can't write about that, though, we'll get sued!"

Anything that restricts the first breaks democracy, your claim is Step One for any fascist uprising.

Not that I agree or disagree, but he didn't say that, he said we're better off without Gawker, or rather, the type of articles that it published. There's a difference.

We are not better off without Gawker.

Well, okay. Again, I'm not taking a position on this one, just saying that you two were arguing different points.

Out of curiosity, I wonder how Gawker compares Breitbart News. They sits at the opposite side of the political table, both claims to be media companies, and both got targeted by activism by people who want to shut them down. Both also seems to have walked a rather thin line between legal and illegal.

Arbitrarily? Either you don’t know the history of this case, or you’re misusing this word.