Aron D’Souza, the brainchild behind the lawsuit to kill Gawker Media, says he wants to fix journalism. To that end, in the spring he launched a platform that he described as a “private AI tribunal” to adjudicate the veracity of media claims.
“Today, anyone can publish allegations. Almost no one can afford to challenge them. Objection changes that. It gives everyone a fast, affordable, evidence-based way to dispute statements in the media,” the platform’s homepage read until late May. Then, the site was unceremoniously taken down, not long after The Intercept’s interview with D’Souza.
“Due to feedback we’re rebuilding for an epistemic and primary sourced future,” Objection’s site, which features an uncanny AI-animated image of a painterly woman’s shifting eyes, now reads. “Stay tuned for updates.”
The platform itself was something of a mishmash between Snopes.com for right-wing culture war issues and a private defamation arbitration service marketed to the everyman. Among the claims it was adjudicating was whether Joe Rogan promoted the use of “horse dewormer” ivermectin as a Covid-19 cure and claims by Sen. Bernie Sanders that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.
It’s deeply unclear how many everyday people need easy access to defamation remedies; the lawsuit that eventually killed Gawker was brought on behalf of the professional wrestling star Hulk Hogan and funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who is also one of the backers of Objection. But when I caught up with D’Souza, an Oxford-educated lawyer, to discuss the project which has been criticized for its possible impacts on press freedom, he was awash in populist rhetoric.
“I don’t think anyone is actually happy with the state of journalism,” he told me. “My view is that someone needs to structurally fix journalism.”
When I asked why he shuttered the site, D’Souza pointed to sky-high demand.
“After launch, we received many customer requests for more complex investigations (with much higher willingness to pay),” he said. “As such, we decided to focus the team on retooling the website.”
When I first spoke with D’Souza shortly after launch, he was fresh off ringing the opening bell for the IPO of his other venture, which includes the Enhanced Games, a kind of Olympics where all manner of performance-enhancing drugs were allowed. We spoke about his views on the press and how he hopes his controversial Objection AI platform will reform the media.
There isn’t much that D’Souza points out that isn’t already obvious to most casual observers of the state of news media. Journalists are underpaid. “It’s kind of unimaginable why you would go to Columbia Journalism School and get half a million dollars in debt and then get paid $50,000 to write at The Huffington Post,” he said. The business model for most publishers “has completely fallen apart.” And “the people who are being written about,” he said, “aren’t very happy because they feel like they’re being represented incorrectly.”
On top of all of that, the editorial boards of the largest mainstream media outlets, owned by a handful of elite families, reflect their own biases — whether it’s the Sulzberger family, who owns the New York Times, or the Murdochs, the News Corp scions who own Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.
“You walk into that building on 6th Avenue in New York and you feel the presence of Rupert Murdoch, as you’re aware. You walk into the Daily Mail building on Kensington High Street in London, you feel the presence of the Rothermere family. In a more subtle way, you walk into the New York Times building, and you feel the presence of the Sulzbergers,” D’Souza said.
According to him, that concentrated, elite media ownership class has contributed to a compounding, historic crisis that threatens the credibility of journalism as a whole. Just 28 percent of Americans trust the media, according to a 2025 Gallup survey, the lowest it’s ever been. Republicans, who are traditionally the partisan group with the lowest trust in media, have remained that way (6–17 percent) but curiously, now only a slim majority of Democrats — 51 percent — say they trust traditional media. For all intents and purposes, D’Souza’s got much of the diagnosis right. It’s his solution that’s the problem.
The centerpiece of Objection is what the company calls its “Honor Index,” a rating system that purports to tell how credible a journalist is. Here’s how it works: For a fee of $2,500 to $5,000 (depending where on the website you looked), anyone can file an Objection. After that, your case is investigated by what the platform describes as “the most qualified researchers,” which it says include award-winning investigative journalists, former CIA and FBI agents, and military intelligence officers.
The resulting investigation purportedly identifies the factual claims that require investigating, and adjudicates evidence by its “proximity to the underlying event.” Primary sources, documents, court filings, emails, and transaction records are valued at the highest premium. Anonymous sources “lacking a traceable origin” rank lowest. Once the investigators have gathered their “evidence” and offered the journalist in question an opportunity to reply, a proprietary AI system makes a judgment on the quality of the claim. The goal, ostensibly, is greater transparency into the business of newsgathering.
“The actual article you publish,” he told me, referring to this Intercept story, “will only include a very small percentage of the actual data that has been transmitted to you. We live in this world of infinite cloud storage, infinite AI comprehension capability. So why isn’t that underlying data available?”
On first blush, D’Souza’s critiques mostly track, but for the fact that much of what he is asking for is already standard practice in many newsrooms. Pick through the archives of the once formidable, now-defunct BuzzFeed News data investigations team and you’ll find the underlying code for the publication’s award-winning investigation into surveillance aircrafts used by the military and law enforcement agencies, among other stories. Most newsrooms that practice data journalism host GitHub pages where people can audit their code and datasets.
Anonymous sources are D’Souza’s biggest gripe. They are “one of the greatest power asymmetries that exists in the modern world.”
Anonymous sources, however, are D’Souza’s biggest gripe. They are, he said, “One of the greatest power asymmetries that exists in the modern world.” By his reasoning, science doesn’t use anonymous sources and is subject to peer review, so why isn’t journalism held to the same standard of external oversight?
It doesn’t take much to realize that the power differential exists in much the opposite direction. Who’s more of a threat: a whistleblower speaking out about the dangers of some of the biggest companies in the world, or the powerful company with the $300 billion market cap sitting on some of the most sophisticated surveillance architecture in the world?
When Objection launched in April, and up until after our conversation, D’Souza said the company had seeded a list of active cases it was working on adjudicating. One case under active “investigation” before the site went dark was “The Public v. Hannah Broughton,” over the statement made in the U.K.-based outlet The Mirror that “Amazon workers were forced to work around a dead colleague and told ‘don’t look.’” However, Broughton wasn’t the originator of that claim; it was originally made by the investigative journalism outlet The Western Edge. The Mirror had merely aggregated the publication’s reporting and sourced it to the original reporter.
When I asked D’Souza about the claim and why, while it was under investigation, the company decided to reach out to the aggregator, he responded, “Repetition is not a defense to defamation in law.” Publications are generally liable for republishing defamatory content. But scrutinize that investigation further, and among the evidence listed is other stories, including by People magazine, that also aggregated The Western Edge — but not the actual Western Edge story.
But the real irony is that the person investigating that claim for Objection is listed as an “anonymous investigator.” When asked about fighting anonymity with more anonymity, D’Souza again gestured to the “power imbalance to be reckoned with.” While the case is being investigated, he said, Objection doesn’t want to “disclose the name of the investigator because a rich and powerful individual might say, oh, ‘I’m going to go bribe that investigator.’” The investigator’s name, he said, would be published when the investigation concludes.
It would take an awfully credulous person to believe that the businessman behind the shuttering of Gawker has an authentic stake in “fixing” journalism — especially considering that D’Souza described in an editor’s letter once live on the site that he views Objection as a “natural extension” of his and Thiel’s invasion of privacy lawsuit. Even so, one might wonder how the infamous sex tape story that was Gawker’s undoing would fare through Objection’s proprietary AI adjudication process. After all, Hulk Hogan did have sex with Bubba the Love Sponge’s wife, and Gawker did have the receipts, namely the video, to prove it.
Objection’s AI arbitration system, in which both the aggrieved figure and the journalist would need to agree to, also seems to have a fatal flaw. In promoting the use of AI judges, D’Souza cites a paper by two University of Chicago legal scholars that suggests AI adjudicators apply the law more consistently than human judges. In one test case, AI cited judicial precedent 99 percent of the time in its decision-making versus 61 percent for human judges. But that paper also critiques that level of accuracy. The paper’s authors write, “Another possibility is that GPT is actually a better judge than humans are. While many readers have argued that this is the proper reading of our results, we believe that this theory is decisively contradicted by the fact that GPT made decisions like law students.”
“If you allow judges that latitude, they may be more lenient to an attractive female defendant rather than to a man.”
Real judges, the authors say, don’t make decisions in a legal vacuum but also through the broader human context of their decisions. Asked about that conclusion, D’Souza questioned whether “the goals of the law” should be more “interpretive” or more by “the letter of the law.”
“If you allow judges that latitude, they may be more lenient to an attractive female defendant rather than to a man,” he said. “I firmly believe that we should be reducing human bias.”
But that area of human judgment is also arguably how the legal profession moves the law forward and how unjust laws are overturned. The seeds of this country’s freedom of the press law were laid when a jury defied the British crown’s judges and refused to convict the publisher of a small New York printing press of libel for publishing material that offended the then-governor of the state. Jurors would nullify the convictions of those who helped fugitive slaves flee violating the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In the 1970s, when the Camden 28 were tried for breaking into their local draft board offices and destroying their draft cards, the jury again acquitted the group based on their moral conviction. It’s hard to imagine that AI, trained on the letter of the law as it’s written, could easily navigate the murky moral waters that those laws may produce.
“Human judges are able to depart from rules when following them would produce bad outcomes from a moral, social, or policy standpoint,” the paper’s authors write.
A more basic mark against the AI arbiter the paper’s authors point out is fundamental to how these systems work — or don’t: “No one understands how they make decisions, and some people speculate that their decisions are literally unintelligible for humans.”
D’Souza is asking a question as old as the oldest democracy: Who watches the watchmen?
One doesn’t have to look farther than the appalling double standard the mainstream press has applied to its coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza to see the relevance of that question. But in a world where American press freedom is already backsliding in favor of the wealthiest, it’s hard to see how a black-box AI “fact-checker” backed by the billionaire owner of one of the world’s biggest military tech company is a better solution than a well-funded public media ecosystem buttressed by press freedom laws that are designed to hold the most powerful among us accountable.
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