Gawker was not, and never was “a large company”.
We live in an era where most media entities are owned by large companies: Yahoo, Time Warner, Disney…
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/media-ownership/
Gawker was one of the few companies that actually was a standalone entity: a media outlet, employing journalists and doing original reporting. That’s an incredibly rare thing today. For example, Medium is not that. I don’t get a check for creating content for Medium. And as a blogger, Medium benefits from any story I publish, and if I publish something Gawkeresque, they leave me to hang.
Perhaps that’s the ideal, for you. A media ecology where platforms gain millions of dollars and take on no risk for the journalists they neither pay nor defend. Which massively limits risk-taking: as you said, most individuals are in no shape to financially weather suits from entities like Disney.
This matters because one of the biggest of such platforms, is Facebook. And Peter Thiel sits on the board. Facebook exerts complete control over posts. Facebook will lock your account if you write things that violate their inscrutable TOS.
Facebook will lock your account while you are writing about police hanging around outside your apartment, because the cops asked them to.
At the same time, Facebook has been a platform for enormous amounts of illegal, privacy invading footage.
http://observer.com/2014/07/woman-sues-facebook-after-friend-uploads-nudes-with-her-face-pasted-on/
In fact, I have a challenge for you: can you find how that case resolved? Was Facebook held liable for hosting revenge porn? It took them another two years to ban revenge porn in their TOS. They still haven’t actually achieved the goal of not hosting any. And no one seems to think Facebook should be driven out of business for allowing so many people to lose their privacy.
Do you? I feel like this whole thing is nothing to celebrate. It only goes further to entrench entities with no duty to users and no real oversight.
“April 5, 2016: Hulk Hogan’s lawyer, Charles Harder, publishes a guest column in the Hollywood Reporter detailing how his client won his case against Gawker. Harder wrote “The jury’s verdict sends a message to irresponsible websites: Think twice before you invade someone’s privacy or violate their rights.”
