News Analysis

The trial involving Gawker and Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, over the publication of a sex video raised timeless legal questions about privacy and freedom of the press. The result, with the jury awarding Bollea $115 million in compensatory damages, could threaten Gawker’s existence.

But in many ways, the Gawker that posted the video — an aggressive and unpredictable news and gossip site — has already passed into memory. So, too, has an era of the web in which Gawker thrived.

In the last few years, digital news sites with ambition — even the ones, like Gawker, that had originally hailed themselves as being anti-establishment — have undergone something of a self-correction. Vivid videos of random bedroom romps are out; a little bit of privacy is in.

Readers, empowered by social media, have reshaped publications directly, by collective will. And they seem to realize that the photos and videos captured on their smartphones or elsewhere could just as easily be used against them as anyone else, including a celebrity.

“Now that ‘everyone’ has a ‘sex tape’ — and everyone is at risk of having their sex tape published online,” the publication of celebrity sex tapes is less justified in the eyes of readers, said Max Read, a former editor of Gawker.

The online world in which these sites operate, even compared with 2012 when Gawker posted the video of Bollea, is no longer the same. Visitors increasingly arrive from social platforms — mainly Facebook — and those readers have far more control of how a story is received.

Pleasing stories can be shared and cheered on those social platforms. Behavior deemed bad can now be shunned with immediate results.

The change was evident as the verdict came down on Friday.

On Twitter and elsewhere, fans of Bollea and critics — including many journalists — enthusiastically cheered the potential death of Gawker. Some others, shocked at the size of the award, declared it a chilling moment for the press. (Legal experts suggest that the real influence of the case, in the event that this decision is upheld, would be narrow.)

But in 2012, the vast majority of Twitter posts that linked to Gawker’s video were lighthearted jokes — about Bollea’s physique, about the humiliation of a childhood idol, about fame-seeking.

A similar sense of outrage built in 2014, when hackers posted hundreds of photos obtained from celebrities’ private accounts. Publications that had previously trafficked in leaked nude photos — including Gawker Media properties and sites like BuzzFeed — shied away from publishing them.

Instead, reporters covered the hack as news. Writers published essays examining the hack through the lens of privacy and consent; readers, frequently confronted with privacy worries of their own, were receptive.

Today, the decision of whether to publish the most sensitive content often doesn’t fall on publications or editors. It falls to online services that openly host videos and images, and to the social platforms on which videos and images spread.

A video like the one that ran on Gawker might now appear on a site like LiveLeak, where people can post and distribute videos. Or it might be posted to a site like Vidme, a newer video host, or directly to Twitter, where it might be removed, only to surface again.

File hosts and social networks are governed by individual terms of service.

Having rules is one thing; enforcing them is another. Large platforms usually rely on a combination of employee oversight and user reporting to identify content that violates policy. Rules are enforced primarily through after-the-fact removal, not up-front moderation. Imgur, despite a ban, still hosts a large repository of sexual material.

For media organizations, that means some of the most difficult decisions are limited to deciding if, and how, to acknowledge information that, as far as they are concerned, seems to publish itself.

A hack in which content from Sony’s internal network, including email, was posted online forced editors to choose whether to access and use information that was available to anyone with a web browser.

Celebrity nude photos, posted by hackers, became a news story and jumping-off point for discussions about privacy and consent. Videos of violence involving police officers, some posted directly to platforms by citizens, forced the subject into view, reverberating around the country. ISIS circumvented news outlets by uploading videos directly to video hosts. Gatekeepers had become bystanders, controlling little beyond their own participation.

Gawker appears to have already accepted this new reality. In July, after the site outed a male media executive for messaging a male escort, Gawker’s founder Nick Denton, who is an outspoken critic of more conventional news outlets, had the post taken down. Some of his top editors revolted and left not long after. He then announced that the site should be “10 to 15 percent” nicer.

Just a month earlier, the company’s editorial employees had voted to unionize. And in November, the site announced that it would focus on covering politics, not the media and celebrity circles it had long skewered.

The final legal outcome in the Hulk Hogan case may be years away. Whatever the result, it could end up not as a significant legal precedent, or as a landmark freedom of speech case, but as a curious artifact of a recent but nonetheless bygone era of web journalism.

© 2016 The New York Times Company