Hulk Hogan’s Biggest Impact May Have Been in Digital Privacy

Hulk Hogan’s Biggest Impact May Have Been in Digital Privacy

By Deni Ellis Béchard edited by Jeanna Bryner

Hulk Hogan died today, reportedly of cardiac arrest, at age 71 in Clearwater, Fla. Born Terry Bollea, Hogan was a star wrestler known for his showmanship and affinity for tearing his shirt off before matches. But he was also a common target of digital manipulation, exploitation and online hoaxes, spurring him to champion privacy rights in the digital age.

For those who have followed Hogan’s life closely, this isn’t the first time his death has been announced. According to the Internet, he died in 2014 and did so again in 2015—both times by gunshot—and then passed away yet again in 2024. (The latter claim appeared on a Reddit subreddit dedicated to lies, though some people took it seriously.) Even in the months leading up to his actual death, online rumors claimed that he was on his deathbed or had died. And during that decade of hoaxes—long after the height of his wrestling career—his image was used countless times for digital manipulations. Photographs of Hogan flexing the biceps that he called “24-inch pythons” were often edited to swap out his face, with its iconic horseshoe mustache, and replace it with the face of one of the many people who wanted to be seen inhabiting his body—or with the face of someone else whom others wanted to see on it for their own reasons.

But while Hogan couldn’t prevent the seemingly endless digital manipulations, he became a landmark figure of the digital era for his efforts to defend his right to privacy. Years before “deepfake” was a household word and artificial intelligence systems could allow anyone to puppeteer the image of a legend, Hogan found himself naked—literally—before the Web. In 2012 Gawker, a digital media company known for gossip scoops, acquired a 2006 sex tape involving Hogan (which he asserted had not been filmed with his knowledge or consent) and posted an excerpt online. Hogan sued, and a jury awarded him a total of $140 million in damages, though he settled for $31 million. Behind the scenes of what looked like a tabloid circus was a proxy battle between tech moguls. Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who had been outed as gay by Gawker years before, funded Hogan’s lawsuit. The case, which bankrupted Gawker, would become a major test for First Amendment rights in a time when clicks were increasingly becoming currency and online privacy had few protections.

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Though Hogan’s final headline won’t stop the next hoax video or cloned voice, his life—and the ways it was constantly remixed, misreported and monetized—illustrate how the fight over a single leaked tape previewed the question of individual privacy rights in a world where manipulating pixels has become almost effortless. The years to come will no doubt see Hogan’s image in AI-generated content, and legal cases around digital privacy issues promise to become only more complicated.