On September 24, 2026, a glass plaque will be presented at the Axel Springer headquarters, the Axel Springer Award, given for outstanding leadership in media and technology. The ceremony will be streamed online, journalist Bari Weiss will speak, and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin will talk about the early years of Silicon Valley, followed by the presentation of the award. Put the inscription next to the résumé of the man being honored, and you read two different things. Being honored for his contributions to media is Peter Thiel, a man whose best-known impact on a media outlet was making it disappear. A German publishing house is honoring one of America’s best-known media destroyers, and that alone says something about the state of the industry. That gets the transatlantic irony exactly right, German award giver, American recipient.
Thiel is on the extreme right and donates to Republicans in Trump’s orbit, but what made him famous was a lawsuit. Angry over the online outlet Gawker’s reporting about his private life, he secretly financed lawsuits against the company with $10 million until a judgment in favor of wrestler Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, drove Gawker into shutting down and selling itself off. Thiel later said financing those lawsuits was one of the greatest philanthropic things he had ever done. Reporters Without Borders called him a serious threat to the freedom and independence of the press at the time, especially because he had concealed his role; what he did, the organization said, was no different from governments using legal or economic pressure to silence a media outlet they did not like.
The old idea that press freedom is threatened by the censor’s stamp does not go far enough. A checkbook shuts down a publication more quietly and more thoroughly, and it does not need a government agency to do it. A lawsuit with enough money behind it can accomplish what a ban could not, and it does so in the name of the law. Palantir, Thiel’s company, also recently went after the Swiss online magazine Republik, which had reported that the company had repeatedly failed to win contracts from the Swiss government. Among other things, Palantir demanded that the magazine publish a series of rebuttals written by the company. A Swiss court rejected Palantir’s demands on 22 of 23 counts and ordered the company to pay most of the costs. In a post that was later deleted, Palantir once again denied that it was a surveillance company.
Read also our article: The Architecture of Control: How Peter Thiel’s Data Power and the Political Network Rockbridge Undermine Democracy
Palantir, ICE and the Billion Dollar Business of Deportation
And yet this is exactly the company that has now been given a new assignment. It is the oldest trick of power, do not ban a value, take possession of its name, and whoever controls the word freedom no longer needs a censor. The Trump administration is appointing the surveillant as guardian of freedom from surveillance, the wolf as shepherd. Under the State Department’s Freedom Tech Excellence Program, which is supposed to run until early 2029, Palantir will become a partner and advise the government on free speech online and privacy protection. On paper, it is also about countering digital surveillance and the responsible use of artificial intelligence, along with the First Amendment. Company employees are supposed to temporarily move into the department, some of them with security clearances. The department insists that the program is not intended to expand its own use of AI. Investigations show otherwise. Carrie DeCell of the Knight First Amendment Institute calls it something like doublespeak; neither this department nor the partners it has named are credible advocates for what they call free speech, and that objection carries even more weight given this administration’s own record on the First Amendment. Anduril is listed as another partner, a military technology company from Thiel’s orbit in which his Founders Fund has invested around $2.6 billion and whose executive chairman Trae Stephens is also a partner there. Co-founder Palmer Luckey shares Thiel’s political views along with his fondness for “The Lord of the Rings,” and Thiel is also backing Luckey’s new bank, Erebor.
What Palantir actually is cannot easily be put into one sentence. The company became known and controversial around the world through enormous data-analysis platforms, contracts for databases and tracking systems used by police and federal agencies, and it stubbornly fights the label surveillance company. Its CEO Alex Karp denied in a podcast last year that the company was involved in unconstitutional surveillance, while an unsigned company post stated flatly that it was not a surveillance company. Documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden paint a different picture. According to those documents, Palantir helped expand the National Security Agency’s worldwide data collection, a program capable of collecting communications from Americans in massive quantities alongside communications from abroad. Its government clients include the military and the State Department itself, as well as ICE, which the company has worked with for 15 years; its contracts supported raids that separated families, and it built software specifically for the agency to track so-called self-deportations and visa overstays.
Representatives Dan Goldman and Nydia Velázquez demanded answers from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security in April about how this technology was being used to build what they called a mass-surveillance ecosystem. Through its work for the IRS, Palantir gained access to sensitive federal databases; 10 members of Congress questioned its CEO about a mega-database built from that information, which the company denied existed. In New York, a contract with the city’s public hospitals gave Palantir access to patient data, and after public scrutiny, the contract was not renewed. In Britain, the National Health Service just apologized after falsely claiming that Palantir personnel did not have access to patient data; protests there have also focused on the company’s ties to the Israeli military. David Greene of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says making Palantir an advocate for civil rights damages the initiative and the moral authority of the United States on questions of free speech. A power that claims the name of freedom while supplying the tools for violating it has already half emptied the word of its meaning.
That leaves the question for this country. A date on the calendar is not an act of nature, it is a decision, and decisions can be reversed. In the United States, resistance to the data giants is growing, in Britain the pressure on Palantir is increasing, and in Ireland, an investigation and a leaked document, along with resistance from a handful of people without legislation and without a political party behind them, got a five-star hotel to cancel a booking. No publishing house is forced to hand out an award, and no hall has to be filled. A glass plaque does not weigh more than the will of those watching, and the only question is whether enough of them make it clear what they think about it.
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