"Facebook under fire as states seek to rein in the social media giant" PBS NewsHour 12/09/2020
Excerpt
SUMMARY: Facebook is one of the most valuable companies in the world, but its dominance is the subject of major new antitrust actions. A pair of lawsuits filed by the Federal Trade Commission, and by 46 states, allege that Facebook used its power illegally to drive out competition and buy out rivals. Phil Weiser, Colorado's Democratic attorney general, joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the suits.
SUMMARY: The U.S. women's soccer team hopes to defend its World Cup title this year. But on Friday, International Women’s Day, all 28 team members filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, arguing they suffered years of institutionalized gender discrimination--and lower pay. Elizabeth Mitchell of the New York Daily News, and soccer star Julie Foudy join Amna Nawaz to discuss.
SUMMARY: When Hulk Hogan won $140 million in court from millionaire Nick Denton's Gawker Media after it published video of him having sex, the verdict raised serious questions about journalistic ethics. Hogan's suit was funded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal who Gawker outed as gay a decade earlier. Hari Sreenivasan talks to Wired's Jason Tanz for more on the case and its implications.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): So, let's go over just basics of what happened in this case, because most people aren't following Hulk Hogan's sex tape saga too closely.
JASON TANZ, Editor-At-Large, WIRED: Sure.
So, a few years ago, Gawker published an article that included a video of a sex tape that Hulk Hogan had made, actually was made without his knowledge. They declared it was in the public interest because Hulk Hogan was a public figure and he had gone on record talking about how he had not had sex with this woman, and they had proof that he had. So they published it, somewhat gleefully, which has always been Gawker's kind of stock and trade.
They have been very forward in their — in what they declare to be in the public interest. And they thought this was. Hulk Hogan didn't see things that way. He brought a lawsuit against them. The jury found against Gawker to the tune of $140 million, which was a pretty shocking about.
Gawker has appealed the case and they're waiting to see how that plays out.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, how does Peter Thiel get involved in this? He — there's no love lost between the founder of Gawker, Nick Denton, and Peter Thiel.
JASON TANZ: Nick Denton had suspected that there was actually somebody funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit, because the way Hogan was prosecuting the suit, he was making decisions that, if he were interested in making money, game theory suggests that he would have done something differently.
He could have taken reportedly about a $10 million settlement. He also withdrew a part of the lawsuit that would have required a payout from Gawker's insurance. They actually just withdraw that, so that Gawker would be on the hook and not the insurance company.
So, that indicated maybe there was something else going on. In 2007, Gawker had — and, specifically, its site Valleywag had outed Peter Thiel as a gay man. Thiel at the time swore his revenge. And now, nine years later, he is getting it. He had a team of lawyers who were looking for various plaintiffs who could file suits that they could fund, and apparently they found more than one. Supposedly, there a couple of other suits out there that he's prepared to bring against Gawker as well.
A ProPublica analysis of state court filings reveals that Capital One sues its customers far more than any other bank.
Several years ago, Capital One gave Oscar Parsons, 46, his first credit card. At the time, he didn’t need a loan. But he banked at a Capital One branch near his Bronx apartment, and when it was offered, he thought, “Why not?”
Initially, he had little problem keeping up with the payments. But after a run of construction jobs came to an end, he fell behind and found himself ducking the bank’s collections calls, he said. Each time the company’s TV commercials popped up, asking, “What’s in your wallet?” Parsons thought: “It’s not enough to pay you back.”
This year, Capital One provided Parsons with another first, his first lawsuit. For failing to pay his $1,800 debt, the company took him to court. Currently on public benefits and in a job training program, Parsons has nothing Capital One can take. But should Parsons find work, Capital One could use a court judgment to seize money from his bank account or take a portion of his wages.
It was a hard lesson — one learned by hundreds of thousands of the bank’s cardholders. No lender sues more of its customers than Capital One, according to ProPublica's review of state court data.
Over the past year, ProPublica has sought to illuminate the scope of debt collection lawsuits, which, though they are often filed by public companies in public courts, are a largely hidden part of the nation’s financial life. The suits hit workers who earn below $40,000 a year the hardest and federal garnishment laws provide scant protection. Even workers near the minimum wage could have a quarter of their take-home pay taken or their bank accounts cleaned out. State laws typically offer little more protection.
To identify which companies file the most collection suits, ProPublica obtained and analyzed court data from 11 states. In every state, Capital One stood out.
During the years of the recession, particularly 2008 through 2010, when the number of credit card defaults surged, many banks filed more lawsuits. But Capital One dwarfed them all, reaching levels never matched by any company before or since, according to ProPublica’s review of data going back to 1996.
By our estimate, the suits exceeded half a million per year nationally during those peak years.
Since 2011, Capital One’s suits have dropped considerably, though they have continued to far exceed the totals of any other bank. For example, in Indiana counties for which court data is available — home to about two-thirds of the state’s population — the bank filed about 3,360 suits in 2014. That’s about a quarter of the suits Capital One filed in 2010, but still more suits than all other national banks combined in 2014. In Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, Capital One’s suits comprised about 40 percent of all suits by major banks. In Miami-Dade County, Florida, the tally was about the same.
