Month: May 2016

Facebook has grown so dominant that it is one of the world’s largest nations, and co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is effectively the dictator of that country, according to Peter Sunde, the co-founder of the Pirate Bay file-sharing site.

Sunde made his remarks during an interview with CNBC at a conference in Amsterdam organized by The Next Web. “Facebook is the biggest nation in the world and we have a dictator, if you look at it from a democracy standpoint,” Sunde said. “Mark Zuckerberg is a dictator. I did not elect him. He sets the rules.”

You can’t opt out of Facebook. I’m not on Facebook but there are a lot of drawbacks in my offline world. No party invitations, no updates from my friends, people stop talking to you, because you’re not on Facebook. So it has real life implications.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Zuckerberg is dictator of the world’s largest nation, Pirate Bay founder says”

Gawker Media, the New York-based blog network founded by Nick Denton, has already had to seek outside funding from a Russian investment fund as a result of a $140 million judgement recently won by former wrestler Hulk Hogan. Now, the company is said to be exploring a sale of some or all of its assets.

The only question is: Who would agree to buy it knowing that billionaire Peter Thiel is determined to destroy it by whatever means necessary?

Earlier estimates, including one from Nick Denton himself, have pegged Gawker’s value at about $250 million. Any offer for the company’s assets, however, would have to include a potential payment of as much as $140 million to Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel, so a bid of $50 million or so is still within the ballpark of what Gawker is theoretically worth.

In an emailed statement, a Gawker spokesman said that nothing has changed, and that the company has “always said we’re exploring contingency plans of various sorts” in case the Hogan judgment is upheld on appeal. The spokesman went on to say:

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Targeted for destruction by a billionaire, Gawker puts itself up for sale”

Some billionaire venture capitalists fund bizarre research into how human beings might become immortal, while others want to set up a series of islands on which people could live without being subject to the laws of a specific country. And some get their lawyers to shop around for lawsuits they can fund in order to help put a news website out of business.

Peter Thiel, the man best known for his early investment in Facebook and for being a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, isn’t just any billionaire VC. He’s doing all of those things at the same time. The Immortality Project and the Seasteading Institute seem harmless enough, for the most part, but Thiel’s funding of a $140-million lawsuit against Gawker Media is anything but—if you have any interest in a free press, that is.

After Gawker founder Nick Denton suggested earlier this week that a wealthy benefactor was helping fund wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the company, Forbes named Thiel as the one providing the cash. Finally, late on Wednesday, the billionaire came forward and admitted to the New York Times that he helped to finance not just Hogan’s legal case, but at least one other case against Gawker, as part of a plan he has been working on for several years.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Billionaire Peter Thiel says to defend journalism he needs to crush it”

The legal fight between former wrestler Hulk Hogan and Gawker Media inevitably lends itself to metaphors taken from the WWE. But is Hogan the “face,” or good guy, and Gawker founder Nick Denton the “heel,” or bad guy—or is it the other way around? To further complicate things, a new character has now been added to the drama: The rich benefactor who has been bankrolling and possibly also controlling the heavyweight battle from behind the scenes.

After a report by Forbes, which the New York Times eventually corroborated, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel gave the NYT an interview in which he admitted to helping fund Hogan’s legal case. Thiel is probably best known for being an early investor in Facebook and a co-founder of PayPal.

To recap, Hogan sued Gawker for invasion of privacy after the site published a story in 2012 about the wrestler having sex with a friend’s wife, and included a short clip from a recording of the act. Hogan said he was unaware he was being recorded and that his reputation was besmirched, and earlier this year he won a judgement of $140 million that Gawker is appealing.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “The Gawker vs. Hulk Hogan case just got a lot more important”

Controversy continued Thursday over the question of Facebook’s influence on the news that more than a billion people see every day. In the latest developments, the company’s editorial guidelines around its Trending Topics feature were leaked to The Guardian, and the social-networking giant quickly published its own version, along with another internal document that describes how it decides what news to include and what not to.

The controversy got started earlier this week, with a piece by Gizmodo that looked at how several journalists who worked on the Trending Topics feature were treated by the social network, and what they were expected to do.

The original story mostly focused on how these editorial contractors believed they were simply training Facebook’s news-filtering algorithms, and didn’t feel that the social network cared about journalism much, except as raw material for its engagement engines. Then a second piece appeared that featured comments from an anonymous editor about how staff routinely kept certain sites and topics out of the Trending feed.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Continue reading “Facebook and the news: trends, filter bubbles and algorithmic bias”