Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg has voted to keep billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel on Facebook’s board of directors.
Facebook held its annual shareholders meeting yesterday where every member of the board was up for re-election. The decision to keep Thiel on the board was up to a shareholder vote and it was Zuckerberg – controlling more than 60 percent of the total voting power – whose vote decided that Thiel would remain a board director.
Thiel has been at the centre of media attention following the revelation that he has been funding Hulk Hogans lawsuit against the disgraced gossip blog Gawker. Many have called Thiel’s funding of the former wrestlers lawsuit an infringement on the Gawkers first amendment rights, however these rights do not include massive privacy violations of which Gawker has regularly committed against celebrities and regular people alike.
When asked why he decided to fund this lawsuit, Thiel told The New York Times “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.”
Thiel did concede that although he believes Gawker is damaging to society, he would accept the courts’ decision if they ruled in the company’s favour. “It’s not for me to decide what happens to Gawker. If America rallies around Gawker and decides we want more people to be outed and more sex tapes to be posted without consent, then they will find a way to save Gawker, and I can’t stop it.” said Thiel.
When discussing Thiels actions at the Code Conference earlier this month, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said “Peter did what he did on his own and not as a Facebook board member. We didn’t know about it, and you should talk to him”. Following the shareholder meeting it would seem that Facebook has no intention of succumbing to pressure from pro-Gawker journalists to give Thiel – now a hero to Gawker’s many victims – the boot.
Breitbart will continue to report on Thiels actions and the continuing demise of the once-mighty Gawker media empire.
Lucas Nolan is a Journalism and Media student at Dublin Business School and a regular contributor to Breitbart Tech. He can be contacted via Twitter here: @LucasNolan_
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