The biggest impact of Hulk Hogan could have been in digital confidentiality

The biggest impact of Hulk Hogan could have been in digital confidentiality

By denni Ellis Béchard Published by Jeanna Bryner

Hulk Hogan died today, who would have a cardiac arrest, at 71 in Clearwater, Florida. Born Terry Bollea, Hogan was a star wrestler known for his staging and his affinity for having torn his shirt before the matches. But it was also a common target of digital manipulation, exploitation and online hoax, the stimulant to defend confidentiality rights in the digital age.

For those who followed Hogan’s life closely, this is not the first time that his death has been announced. According to the Internet, he died in 2014 and did it again in 2015 – both by Gunshot – then died again in 2024. (This last statement appeared on a Subredit Reddit dedicated to lies, although some people took it seriously.) Even in the months preceding his real death, online rumors said he was on his bed or was dead. And during this decade of hoax – at length after the height of his wrestling career – his image was used countless times for digital manipulations. Photographs of Hogan bending the biceps he called “24 -inch pythons” have often been modified to exchange his face, with his emblematic horseshoe mustache, and replace it with the face of one of the many people who wanted to be seen living in his body – or with the face of someone other than others wanted to see for their own reasons.

But while Hogan could not prevent apparently endless digital manipulations, he became a historic figure of the digital age for his efforts to defend his right to privacy. Years before “Deepfake” was a clean word and artificial intelligence systems could allow anyone to marry the image of a legend, Hogan found himself naked – literally – before the web. In 2012, Gawker, a digital media company known for Gossip Scoops, acquired a 2006 sex tape involving Hogan (which he affirmed had not been filmed with his knowledge or his consent) and published an online extract. Hogan continued and a jury granted him a total of $ 140 million in damages, although he was satisfied with $ 31 million. Behind the scenes of what looked like a tabloid circus, there was a proxy battle between technological magnates. The billionaire of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, who had been released by Gawker for years earlier, financed the Hogan trial. The case, which failed Gawker, would become a major test for the rights of the first amendment at a time when clicks became more and more currency and online confidentiality had few protections.

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Having been settled in the lower courts, the case of Hogan did not create a legal precedent, but culturally and economically, it had a significant impact and embraced the defenders of privacy who argued that freedom of expression does not automatically prevail over the law of an individual to private life. The case of Hogan was built on the “publication of the private facts” of the law of American privacy offense, a branch of civil law and not of criminal law which deals with wrongs caused by one party to another and where the objective is generally to compensate for the victim rather than punishing the criminal.

Hogan’s trial in particular highlighted the relationship between private life and news. Gawker argued that because Hogan was a public figure and had publicly discussed his sex life, the band could be presented as a news. Hogan replied that everyone, even celebrities, deserves control of their privacy and if their intimate moments can be shared online. By deciding in his favor and by granting Hogan such a large sum of damages, the jury indicated the limits of the online “Anything Goes” publication.

In the wake of the trial, some publishers have been more cautious about the publication of sensational content; Many platforms have also implemented more stringent practices on consent and withdrawal, which have all prefigured today’s battles on personal data security and the legality of synthetic media, such as “Revenge Porn”, Deepfakes, the cloning of the voice and the AI image, and web services that create naked photos of photos that are subject to them. The case has even echoed the concerns of those who are the subject of a “right to be forgotten”, which is recognized in Europe but not in American law.

Even if Hogan’s victory has shown that an individual could use the existing tort to maintain a certain control of private details of his life, even without new laws, the unusual funding of Thiel raised a distinct question: could rich individuals allow confidentiality combinations that small complainants could not afford and that this potentially scary journalism even in cases where the content published was slightly dispensable. Others argued that it was unlikely that the case has a lot of effect on press freedom.

Despite its successes, the case also underlined the challenge of deleting the content once it was published online. The “regenerative” nature of the Internet means that people can copy images and information and publish them again elsewhere; This information can be propagated in an organic and often viral manner on many public and private channels, affecting privacy for all, from public personalities to private. In the end, the case underlined the need for clearer and more nuanced laws concerning privacy in the digital age.

Although Hogan’s latest title will not stop the next hoax video or the cloned voice, his life – and the ways of which he has been constantly remixed, distorted and monetized – will illustrate how the fight against a single disclosed band has previewed the question of individual rights to private life in a world where pixels has become almost effortless. The years to come will undoubtedly see Hogan’s image in the content generated by AI, and legal cases around digital confidentiality problems promise to become more complicated.

Publisher’s note: This article was updated after the publication to add more details on Hogan’s impact on digital confidentiality and its complicated nature.