Just a friendly reminder, Gawker did not out Thiel. He had a public profile on Friendster that clearly described him as interested in men. Gawker's editor at the time remarked that people like him thought the web was this super ultra secret bat cave, and that if you posted something there it wasn't really public.
You admit in your own writing that this is a new way to use twitter. And this wasn't twitter anyways. Most social media platforms have support for blasting things across the nation and support for more private info. You'd have to be insane to actually argue (and it seems thats what you're doing) that Peter Thiel was trying to tell the nation he was gay.