Adfichterjust READ THIS.
"So how does a sophisticated data intelligence company respond to well-sourced investigative journalism based on official government documents?
By suing the journalists, of course.
But here’s the thing that makes this even more absurd: Palantir isn’t even claiming the articles are false. The company isn’t suing for defamation. It isn’t seeking damages. Instead, it’s invoking a Swiss “right of reply” statute, alleging that Republik didn’t give the company a sufficient opportunity to respond. Palantir wants the court to force the magazine to publish lengthy counter-statements to each article.
(....)
Now, thanks to the lawsuit, the story has gone international. The Financial Times is covering it. The European Federation of Journalists is covering it. A UK member of parliament has already cited the Republik investigation during a debate on British defense contracts with Palantir, using the story to suggest that the British government “pivot away” from Palantir.
The Republik investigation itself is genuinely worth reading, and not just because Palantir desperately doesn’t want you to.
It paints a picture of a company that spent seven years working every angle to get Swiss federal agencies to buy its products—approaching the Federal Chancellery during COVID, pitching the Federal Office of Public Health on contact tracing, presenting anti-money laundering software to financial regulators, making repeated runs at the military—and getting turned away at every door. Sometimes embarrassingly, such as the Federal Statistical Office director apparently just ignoring Palantir’s outreach entirely.
For a company that brags about its ability to “optimize the kill chain” and whose CEO once told investors that “Palantir is here to disrupt… and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and occasionally kill them,” getting politely rejected by the Swiss statistical office has to sting a little.
But suing the journalists who reported on it? When the entire basis of your lawsuit is “we want you to publish our talking points” rather than “anything you published was wrong,” it makes pretty clear you don’t actually have a substantive response to the reporting. If Palantir thinks the picture is false, the remedy is to demonstrate that the documents are wrong—not to drag a small magazine through expensive litigation until it capitulates or goes broke."
Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir
If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you’d think someone in the building might have flagged…
Katharina Brunner
Ingo Dachwitz
Jeff Jarvis
DrWeb
Alexander Winkler
Simon Willison
