A Peter Thiel-Backed Tribunal Is Putting Journalists on Trial

The billionaire has reteamed with the legal strategist who helped him bring down Gawker to start an AI-powered appeals court for the rich and aggrieved. For many journalists, blowback is just part of the business. The irate call to the editor or publisher, often expressed through the promise of litigation. The online pile-on, often expressed through personal invective. Occasionally, the threat of violence, often expressed through all-caps derangement. It s rare to encounter a novel variant. But on April 21, I received a remarkable email. Someone has filed an objection against something you wrote, explained Austin Livingston, pointing me to a web page where Purdue Pharma heir Michael Sackler, a film financier and self-styled ethical investor, had paid a new tech startup — fittingly called Objection — to assess the legitimacy of a skeptical article I d published about him and his business in The Hollywood Reporter five years earlier. Livingston, a young staffer who describes his job on LinkedIn as, simply, creating shareholder value, noted that an AI tribunal would attempt to adjudicate a determination of truth, and that the announced outcome will also affect your Honor Index score, a measure of the veracity of your published work. He went on, adding, You can argue your side by uploading your evidence and suggesting your interpretation of the allegation. I perused the web page, designated Sackler v Baum (2026). It featured a countdown clock ticking toward an apparent verdict. Then I read up on the company, which is backed by the prominent right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who waged a legal war against Gawker Media after it published coverage about his business interests and personal life which upset him. The effort led to the outlet s demise. At first glance, Objection seemed to be a kangaroo court catering to rich and infamous plaintiffs, the latest service in the lucrative sector of digital reputation management. I replied to Livingston, explaining I d consulted with my editors and that The Hollywood Reporter believes the article stands on its own. However, I was interested in writing about Objection. Two weeks later, I found myself in a revealing and at times baffling exchange with the Oxford-educated brain trust behind the firm about the nature of truth, trust, transparency and power. Objection s Founder and CEO is Aron D Souza, an Australian entrepreneur and provocateur best known as the mastermind behind Thiel s litigation strategy against Gawker, which involved a patient, extensive search for the ideal proxy plaintiff to sink the online news outlet. The campaign, quietly funded by the tech investor, culminated in Hulk Hogan s successful invasion-of-privacy suit and ultimately helped force Gawker into bankruptcy. Thiel s involvement, with D Souza as the intermediary to Hogan attorney Charles Harder, was exposed after the verdict. More recently, Thiel has backed D Souza s company Enhanced Games — dubbed the steroid Olympics — which offers athletes financial incentives to compete under rules that allow performance-enhancing drugs. The company, which also counts Donald Trump Jr. as a key investor, went public in early May. To discuss Objection, D Souza and I convened for a video call along with the company s chief technology officer, Kyle Grant-Talbot. They played rugby together at Oxford. D Souza, in the signature quarter-zip of the startup tribesmen, exuded the confidence and finesse of someone long adept at raising money. Grant-Talbot, an Englishman whose CV includes engineering stints at NASA and SpaceX, struck me as his more grounded counterpart. D Souza, who s long had the notion of rating news outlets, started Objection after an extended discussion about the concept with the prominent Silicon Valley investor-entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan. (He now has stakes in both Objection and Enhanced Games.) The Gawker litigation taught me that courts are too slow and they re too expensive, says D Souza. In 2016, after we won the Gawker verdict and Gawker went bankrupt, I considered the idea of buying Gawker and turning it into a news rating website. A decade later, he explains, We re the first people to sell adjudication as a service, comparing his venture to well-respected legal bodies like JAMS, SIAC and the International Chamber of Commerce, which specialize in alternative dispute resolution outside traditional judicial systems. They re private arbitration courts that are very trusted methods of truth-seeking. Of course, these are consensual private forums. Objection issues public verdicts based on investigations paid for by one party, which may be negatively impacted by the refusal of the other side to participate in its process. D Souza grew up in Melbourne, the youngest of three brothers and son of a research scientist. His Ph.D. is in intellectual property law. Now splitting his time between London and New York, he s the type of inveterate founder who s constantly ginning up business plans

A Peter Thiel-Backed Tribunal Is Putting Journalists on Trial

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