There has been much outrage from liberals in the media about the fact that a libertarian billionaire bankrolled Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker. (Flashback: good triumphs over evil.) Many have suggested that this is the death of free speech and an independent press, because anyone who annoys Thiel will face punitive and frivolous lawsuits from now to eternity. This ignores the fact that Hogan's lawsuit was far from frivolous as adjudicated by the courts and that Thiel kept his involvement a secret until the New York Times published a story about the possibility that a tech billionaire may have been paying Hogan's lawyers.
As a beloved and humane movie character once put it, "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?" If the point of Thiel's suit was to scare other outlets into saying nice things about him, it doesn't really make much sense that he only revealed his involvement when he was forced to.
Anyway, the issue here isn't really that a third-party helped fund a suit involving two other parties. As Eugene Kontorovich notes at the Washington Post, such arrangements have become increasingly common and enjoy legal protection. "Anyone who donates to the ACLU or a Legal Aid fund is basically underwriting third-party litigation," Kontorovich writes. "Most recently, private profit-motivated litigation finance has emerged as an industry in its own right, unburdened by any concern over the old common law rules."
Naturally, those sorts of suits are Good Things, while the Thiel/Hogan suit is a Bad Thing. So here are some do's and dont's for Peter Thiel if he wants to avoid liberal outrage in the future (though I'm fairly certain such outrage doesn't really bother him).
Do help bankroll lawsuits against municipalities that put crosses or creches in public spaces. We wouldn't want anyone to think that local governments favor Christianity over, say, devil worship.
Do help bankroll lawsuits against big oil companies filed by nations that are hopelessly corrupt.
Do support government officials using the nearly limitless power of the state to harass nonprofit organizations via massively invasive lawsuits in an effort to intimidate companies into ending their funding of said nonprofits.
Do support efforts aimed at forcing people to bake cakes for ceremonies even when they object to said ceremonies and do take pleasure in their economic destruction.
Whatever you do, for the love of God, don't help fund a lawsuit against an evil corporation with a history of invading peoples' privacy that published a private sex tape without the permission of either of the participants.* Who cares if that evil corporation has a history of trying to destroy careers for trivial reasons and publishes hacked emails with no intent other than to embarrass the victims of that hack? What Thiel did is very Bad. It is a definite don't.
*The best description of the Hogan/Thiel/Gawker freakout has be to Eli Dourado's: "Evil corporation revenge porns a working class hero, gay vigilante ensures justice is served, and the left sides with the corporation?"