6 ms·

A Peter Thiel-Backed Tribunal Is Putting Journalists on Trial

• hsuduebc2 4mo ago
  Well, who could have possibly seen that coming right from this person. I'm so much waiting for this ridiculous AI psychosis driven grifters just to stop bothering other people with their bullshit. >“It’s only the top 1 percent who matter. These are the people who are going to be the value creators” when, in his view, AI soon completely transforms just about every aspect of economic life. >Among other criticisms, D’Souza dismisses the value of anonymous sources, believing they are discrediting, no matter the justification
• k310 4mo ago
  Every supremacist accusation is a confession. Remember, Thiel and Musk are both immigrants. The U.S. legal system is very often a war of attrition. One side can relentlessly sue until the other side is broke, or just threaten. This is the basis of many plea deals, or worse, in the case of Aaron Swartz. Billionaires seem to like it.
• blfr 4mo ago
  Peter Thiel, who waged a legal war against Gawker Media after it published coverage about his business interests and personal life which upset him This is being very economical with the facts. Gawker outed Thiel as gay against his wishes. And while the guy was in Saudi Arabia. Then they published a revenge porn tape of Hulk Hogan, which is what Thiel used to get them.
  • seydor 4mo ago
    i remember knowing that thiel was gay before that story, and i m not even american. the sex tape was bad indeed.
  • caycep 4mo ago
    or....was that a convenient cover story? https://medium.com/@owenthomas/gawker-peter-thiel-and-me-f80389b84fa3 https://medium.com/@owenthomas/gawker-peter-thiel-and-me-f80...
  • ToucanLoucan 4mo ago
    Gawker outing people against their wishes, the person they outed being one of the larger avatars of the crypto-fascist right, who worked with one of the biggest co-conspirators of Vince McMahon's brutal anti-union activities to destroy them for strictly personal reasons. All of these people really deserve each other. Edit: also for bonus points, him getting outed in such a dangerous place is ironic as all hell, given that he didn't need to be there apart from wanting money out of the Saudi royal family. Like I wouldn't want to be outed while there either, but my answer is I wouldn't fucking go to Saudi Arabia with a gun to my head, and I certainly wouldn't be sucking up to the crown prince for m(b?)illions of dollars for my disinformation machine. But I guess principles are for the poors.
    • wat10000 4mo ago
      You wouldn't go there, and I wouldn't go there, but he's rich, there's no real risk for him.
  • pavlov 4mo ago
    Illiberal authoritarian monarchy is Thiel’s favorite form of government, so I’m not sure what his problem is with being outed while in Saudi Arabia.
    • collingreen 4mo ago
      Thiel is firmly in the "rules for thee but not for me" camp which means any authoritarianism he isn't in control of is even worse than a democracy. Ironically many people feel this way but most just don't have the wealth to try their hand at oppression.
    • smegma2 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      • newaccountman2 4mo ago
        At what point did the person to whom you are replying speak in favor of it?
  • newaccountman2 4mo ago
    Your pointing out he was in Saudi Arabia is being very misleading with the facts. It's not like Saudi Arabia cares whether some billionaire Western businessman is gay or not. They also don't care that he's a bigot and an Islamophobe, and he doesn't care that they are Arab, outwardly Muslim, or any other thing he detests. They all worship money.
  • randycupertino 4mo ago
    Yes Gawker was unethical and shouldn't have posted his personal details nor an illegally obtained sex tape, however billionaires shouldn't be able to destroy, censor and control media by deploying their unlimited resources to financially annihilate media outlets in endless litigation to take down reporting they don't like. Free press is already under attack in so many countries, it is dangerous that now a single rich guy can weaponize his unlimited resources to wage legal war over his own personal vendettas because his ego got hurt.
• seydor 4mo ago
  Didn't he move to that place where nazis went ?
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • some_furry 4mo ago
    Yeah, what's up with that? And how many VCs are considering following suit?
  • pesus 4mo ago
    Yup. After he's spent a considerable amount of time and money to promote Nazi politics.
    • dlahoda 4mo ago
      [flagged]
  • drcongo 4mo ago
    Twitter?
  • Hikikomori 4mo ago
    Also grew up with spiritual Nazis.
• bko 4mo ago
  > Peter Thiel, who waged a legal war against Gawker Media after it published coverage about his business interests and personal life which upset him. Didn't Gawker publish an illegally obtained sex tape of Hogan and refused to take it down even after a court order?
• giantfrog 4mo ago
  But on April 21, I received a remarkable email. “Someone has filed an objection against something you wrote,” No one in their right mind is going to do anything other than ignore and/or delete an email this stupid.
• doctorpangloss 4mo ago
  > We’re the first people to sell adjudication as a service PolyMarket and Kalshi are sort of doing that, you could say, adjudication is a valuable service for gambling. I've always thought that the chatbots were much better judges than lawyers. Some real US courts are adopting chatbots for clerical tasks. Hard to say if you can directly sell the services of judging in a general sense, seemingly the only way that is done is for gambling. separately, @dang, is it possible to just cut out the vamping about anything at the top level that isn't really about what is being written
  • Jtsummers 4mo ago
    > separately, @dang, is it possible to just cut out the vamping about anything at the top level that isn't really about what is being written @dang does nothing, email the mods if it's something you care about. Downvoting and flagging are the usual ways to deal with off-topic discussions, though the mods do occasionally create a "stub for off-topicness" and move comments under an auto-collapsed comment of theirs. Again, though, @dang won't reach him, email the mods.
• devindotcom 4mo ago
  What a silly little venture. Essentially a vanity publication for rich fools with thin skin. Though very amusing how completely it fell apart at the slightest prodding by this reporter. edit - kind of curious why this was flagged and removed?
  • catlikesshrimp 4mo ago
    It is more politic than technologic. The story is about a startup that wants to substitute judicial trials with private trials.
    • AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
      They want to create an environment, or an arena, or a marketplace, or some such term, where their judgment actually counts as more than just noise.
    • y2244 4mo ago
      But Thiel is a tier one person in Tech
• Lerc 4mo ago
  Good people can do bad things. Bad people can do good things. Evaluate the things, you may do so being aware of their provenance, but if you use that as the starting point of your conclusion then you are just asking for your biases to be confirmed. There does need to be a higher form of journalistic accountability. If Thiel, or any other person on the planet, proposed a fair mechanism that was free from influence, I would support it. For this I don't neet to know who is behind it, I need to know what its goals are, how it operates, and how does it maintain integrity. Certainly coming from an odius person increases the chance it will not measure up, but for fucks sake, at least do the measuring.
  • jfengel 4mo ago
    As described in the article, this is not a fair mechanism and it is entirely based on influence. This is a bad person doing a bad thing.
    • Lerc 4mo ago
      Very little of the article talks about their process. >Objection assigns a human investigator — at the $2,000 price tier, a college graduate; for $10,000, a former CIA or FBI agent — to gather evidence, which is displayed as exhibits. In my case, just about all of it appeared to be extraneous documentation, like incorporation paperwork for Sackler’s firm, which seemed irrelevant to the matter at hand. Then it prompts a group of AI models (including the name-brand ones such as Claude, ChatGPT and Grok) to act as its jury, analyzing the evidence. D’Souza promises that conclusions will be transparent: “We expose all the math that underpins what we do.” Without pointing to specifics, it doesn't indicate systematic bias. The amount of money paid and combined with the ability of current AIs wouldn't result in anything that I would expect to be reliable, but without showing failures in their methodology, it seems to be just assuming they will exist because they are bad people. The criticism of >Objection’s framing is prosecutorial and binary, asking whether it’s true or false that THR claimed Sackler had used his firm as an “identity makeover” to deflect from his family’s responsibility for the opioid crisis. Yet the article was an inquiry, not a judgment. I'm not particularly fond of the defence of "I'm just asking questions" when any reasonable person can see that the fact that the fact that the prominence of the question suggests otherwise. "Does Peter Thiel keep a small boy locked it a glass cabinet?" and "Did Peter Thiel have cornflakes for breakfast?" The answer to both questions is likely no. Choosing to put one out there and not the other is not "Just asking questions" That applies equally to the THR story and Objection AI. I would grant Objection AI a little leeway for framing the question as "Is it true or false that,..." which is more clearly a statement that allegations exist which may be in doubt, but only if the final result is a definite answer to the question. "Yes", "No", "Insufficient information exists", and "This is subjective" are all valid responses. I would also accept "This question is unanswerable". Any article that poses a question, followed by a series of allegations and then finishes with the question just hanging there unaddressed, is essentially asserting its truth. The article itself characterises it as >As the old Fox News slogan had it, “We report, you decide.” You know, and I know that Fox News is telling you what to decide. Invoking thw words of Fox News as a claim of having a neutral agenda speaks volumes. That Objection AI seems to have made no Judgements and seems to have paused their launch in response to feedback, would suggest that, as yet, there is no evidence that their results are unfair, because they haven't shown any yet.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• alexpotato 4mo ago
  For folks interested in how far a publisher will go for a journalist, I recommend reading the story about Michael Pollan when he wanted to publish an article about opium. Summary: - first publisher said: you can't publish this b/c you could go to prison and we could get in trouble financially - second publisher: you are going to publish this. If you go to prison, we will support your family financially for the entire time you are in prison. If you lose your house, we will buy them a new house. You can read about it here: https://tim.blog/2021/06/30/michael-pollan-this-is-your-mind-on-plants-transcript/#:~:text=me%2E-,In,here%2E%E2%80%9D https://tim.blog/2021/06/30/michael-pollan-this-is-your-mind... People talk a LOT about defending free speech but this story has always stuck out to me as what that really means.
  • thankyoufriend 4mo ago
    Great interview, thanks for sharing. Minor pedantic correction: same publisher, different lawyer
• y2244 4mo ago
  "Once Objection issues an adjudication, satisfied clients can pay an extra fee to promote the finding “so it engages with the disinformation as it spreads through social media,”" So the money maker is PR services after a positive verdict?