For me, the person to be sued is not the news source (Gawker), but the person who posted it to begin with (Bubba).
By the same token, the problem with revenge porn isn't the ex having the videos, it's them distributing them.
I'm not saying the Gawker/Hogan case represents journalism at its finest. But to me, protecting free speech is so important that it's better to err on the side of protecting it rather than restricting it.
You could say Gawker had no serious news story there, but what happens when it's grey? The government has no business having discussions about what is meritorious or not meritorious news.
One could also argue that the damage to Hogan was about as clear as the meritoriousness of the Gawker story, so in the end it doesn't matter. It's literally the Streisand effect, played out on a larger, more serious scale. None of us would remember anything about this episode if Hogan and Thiel hadn't pursued this.
I also think that the difference between your typical ex and a celebrity is critical. When you are seeking celebrity status professionally, I think the expectation of privacy has to be reduced. I hate to say that, and mean no ill-will toward celebrities, but I think that has to be expected. That doesn't mean anything goes in terms of celebrity privacy, but I think it does mean that when you have a case of freedom of the press versus privacy, if you're dealing with a celebrity, the burden gets shifted further to the celebrity to prove wrongdoing, pretty far. I think it's unfair to pursue money by attracting attention to yourself, and the complain when that happens.
Again, Hogan going after Bubba? No problem with that. Going after Gawker? Huge problem.
I have no affection toward Gawker, but the Hogan-Thiel suit (or more appropriately, the decision) set a dangerous, dangerous precedent, because now the onus is on the speaker to prove their speech is "worthy" of protection.
Not disagreeing with you, but I think the underlying, bigger point of pieces like this is that there are network effects that provide dominance to products that are outsized relative to their actual quality.
That is, you might make a good case that Wintel systems in 1996 were as good as Apple products in some sense, or even somewhat better, but I think it would be difficult to argue that the difference in quality was such that it paralleled the difference in market share.
A lot of the things you mention are maybe things I think the author would say are examples of social factors that push the dominance of a product outside its objective quality. In the end, I think lots of these issues come down to semantic vagueness, but I think there's a reasonable point in there.
What people tend to forget is that ironically, Windows I think came to dominate initially because it was more open. That is, you could buy it with whatever hardware you wanted, and didn't need Apple's permission.
Apple later succeeded I think because of something more nebulous, including quality on the software side, but also an appeal to the fashion-and-status-conscious (I say this as someone typing this from a MacBook, so I don't mean that as a slight).
The bigger, more serious problem is really freedom of choice and how network effects restrict that. It's one of the reasons I'm so in favor of open standards. We could argue until we're blue in the face about what X is the higher-quality product, but in the end the thing that drives these kinds of discussion is the fact that in certain fields, once a product becomes dominant, you are obliged to use that product because of others' use.
You might like to use some obscure word processing program that meets your needs better, but if the publishers you're submitting to all require Microsoft Word for some obscure feature, you are forced to use that. If your employer requires the use of some software that's only available on Windows, you might prefer Macs or Linux, but then you are forced to spend a lot of money just to run that software. You might not want to use some messaging software, but if everyone else is using it, you often kind of have to. Even with programming languages there's something similar, where you might want to program in a language, but if everyone else is writing libraries in something else, that kind of coerces you to use that something else. That is not intrinsic to the language; it's about societal use of that language.
In some ways, it's life, but I think with tech the problems get amplified because of interactivity and communication demands. At the extreme end you end up with de facto monopolies that are impossible to get out of. In fact, I think a big case could be made that often when monopolies are established in tech, it's been open standards that have allowed for the destruction of those monopolies.
You're raising some of the best arguments I think I've read for drug regulation, to be honest.
However, for me in the end I think it comes down to this: there's lots of horrible things people can do to each other, and we generally respond to that by punishing the offense.
So, although I'd like to see drugs legalized, I could also see huge taxes on certain types of drugs, at least in certain settings, or punishments for irresponsible advertising, etc.
Fentanyl to me is an interesting example, because to me it illustrates problems with drug regulation: it puts control over decision-making authority into a small group who are given unquestioned deference about those decisions. If anyone could get fentanyl, I think there would be an expectation that everyone evaluate it potentially, and that the consumer learn more about it, or get second opinions from other experts (psychologists, pharmacists, neuroscientists, biochemists). As it is, we sort of say "ok, whatever you say doc" and then ... well... we saw how that went.
Someone expressed surprise at how little the cognitive liberty argument gets raised in all of this, which I agree with 100%, but I'd take that further. What I'd argue is that I'm surprised that physical autonomy, as a health issue, isn't raised more.
To me, drug regulation and medical regulation are two sides of the same coin. The same laws that criminalize ecstasy are the same laws that prevent an experienced, knowledgable consumer from purchasing an antidepressant without a prescription.
People act like if you could get meds from whomever, or on your own, that all hell would break loose, but there are intrinsic consequences to acting heedlessly. People would figure it out fast. And to the extent they didn't, we're better off addressing it as a public health problem than a crime problem.
This is an implicit appeal the article is making that is really unfounded at some level.
They seem to be arguing that, because economists missed the Great Recession, economics is a failure.
The problem is the assumption is that a severe, large event is inherently very predictable because it is severe.
The opposite often happens, though. As you say, predicting volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, suicide, violent acts are all notoriously difficult to predict, and you could make the argument that severe economic events are the same (I'm not saying this is true, only that it's an equal counterargument).
But I think this article is potentially misleading, if unintentionally.
I do these sorts of evaluations professionally routinely, in exactly these sorts of cases.
The state (at least my state) doesn't take children away because of low cognitive ability. They take them away because there's some danger to the children, and low cognitive ability is found to be a contributing factor that's unlikely to go away.
72 and 66 are not just below average, as the article portrays. It's about 2sd below average.
I've seen exactly these sorts of cases, and they're extremely, extremely sad because the parents love their children and truly want the best for them. But when you see the consequences of not intervening, it's often even more sad.
This may be a case where the state screwed up. That happens, and it seems from the Oregonian story that there's disagreement among social workers about their parenting abilities, so it's possible it's in a very grey area.
Lost in the Reason story and buried in the Oregonian story, though, is that the state has a duty to protect the children's privacy usually. It states that they removed the recent child from the parents' care in the hospital without them even being able to take the child home.
In my experience, that often happens when something serious happens to the child in the hospital (for example, hospital staff witness something very threatening or concerning to them). If there was some doubt, given the previous history of involvement, child protection would be more likely to lean toward acting out of caution.
Critically, though, neither child protection nor the hospital would say a peep about this to the press, to protect the child's privacy. So what it would look like from the outside is that the state just came in and took the child away, and isn't providing any explanation for what triggered the removal.
It's also possible this case isn't really over. Children get taken away for long periods of time and then are returned, as long as there aren't permanent decisions in the court system.
I've seen a lot of these types of scenarios, and the reporting on this seems potentially misleading, even if well intended. Although the impression the press is giving could be accurate, I'd want to see a lot more information before I'd pass judgment.
By the same token, the problem with revenge porn isn't the ex having the videos, it's them distributing them.
I'm not saying the Gawker/Hogan case represents journalism at its finest. But to me, protecting free speech is so important that it's better to err on the side of protecting it rather than restricting it.
You could say Gawker had no serious news story there, but what happens when it's grey? The government has no business having discussions about what is meritorious or not meritorious news.
One could also argue that the damage to Hogan was about as clear as the meritoriousness of the Gawker story, so in the end it doesn't matter. It's literally the Streisand effect, played out on a larger, more serious scale. None of us would remember anything about this episode if Hogan and Thiel hadn't pursued this.
I also think that the difference between your typical ex and a celebrity is critical. When you are seeking celebrity status professionally, I think the expectation of privacy has to be reduced. I hate to say that, and mean no ill-will toward celebrities, but I think that has to be expected. That doesn't mean anything goes in terms of celebrity privacy, but I think it does mean that when you have a case of freedom of the press versus privacy, if you're dealing with a celebrity, the burden gets shifted further to the celebrity to prove wrongdoing, pretty far. I think it's unfair to pursue money by attracting attention to yourself, and the complain when that happens.
Again, Hogan going after Bubba? No problem with that. Going after Gawker? Huge problem.
I have no affection toward Gawker, but the Hogan-Thiel suit (or more appropriately, the decision) set a dangerous, dangerous precedent, because now the onus is on the speaker to prove their speech is "worthy" of protection.