Jordan Peterson recently announced he will be launching a social media website alongside Dave Rubin and other key figures. Peterson says the site will have strong free speech policies, and the announcement is quite timely in light of the new Pinterest censorship scandal.
Peterson made the exciting announcement Monday morning on Twitter, stating, “Per the Joe Rogan podcast this week, I’m backing a new platform called thinkspot, currently in Beta. Get on the waitlist here, exciting announcements coming very soon. Thinkspot.com”
Peterson and other thinkers within the “intellectual dark web” have played with this idea for a while. The intellectual dark web includes an interesting variety of thinkers, including atheist Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro, an orthodox Jew. It also includes right-of-center figures such as PayPal founder Peter Thiel and left-of-center figures such as professors Bret and Eric Weinstein.
The group is remarkably diverse, yet they all agree on one point: The radical intolerance of the far left is out of hand, and free exchange of ideas must be defended.
According to Peterson, the platform will won’t voluntarily ban any users. “Once you’re on our platform we won’t take you down unless we’re ordered to by a U.S. court of law,” he said. Thinkspot will also differ from standard social media platforms by requiring comments at least 50 words long in an attempt to elevate the level of public discourse. “You’re gonna have to put a little thought into it,” Peterson said.
The relevance of Peterson’s announcement is highlighted by this week’s Pinterest controversy, as Pinterest banned the pro-life organization Live Action after falsely accusing the group of “spreading misinformation” and classifying their content as porn, according to leaked documents.
In an anonymous interview with Project Veritas, the Pinterest leaker also revealed documents showing that the word “Christian” was blocked from Pinterest’s autocomplete search function because it was classified as a “Sensitive 1” term. Other terms under this classification include “shit sandwich,” “cocaine,” and “wetback.”
Just to reiterate, Pinterest classified “Christian” in the same category as foul language, drugs, and racial slurs. The secular-left bias involved here is truly unbelievable.
Additionally, the leaker revealed that content featuring conservative pundit Ben Shapiro was classified as “white supremacist” and that undercover videos of Planned Parenthood were labeled as “harmful.”
This brings us back to the need for a new social media platform, which Peterson is now trying to create. Can the Canadian actually construct a competitor to the powerful big tech companies? The task is certainly daunting, if not outright insane, as the average apolitical man isn’t going to leave the social media platforms he knows and loves any time soon.
But Peterson doesn’t have to build the next Facebook or YouTube to be successful. If he creates a platform where non-leftists in the political community can share their ideas and reach their supporters without fear of being labeled as hate speech (or porn), that’s an admirable accomplishment well worth fighting for.
In his famous biblical lecture series, Peterson has already taught us lessons from Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Jacob’s ladder. Perhaps the professor can now teach us a lesson from David and Goliath as he tries to take down big tech.
