Jordan Peterson to launch free-speech website

Jordan Peterson is close to completing his own free-speech website to counter censorship.

Expected to launch next month, Thinkspot is inviting people to take part in beta testing. The beta website’s home page declares “ideas live here” and describes Thinkspot as “a collaborative community where individuals can explore and exchange ideas in a thoughtful and respectful manner. The platform is an intellectual playground for censorship-free discourse.”

Peterson is toying with ideas such as a minimum comment length of 50 words to force Thinkspot users to weigh their posts.

“I really got hooked on Twitter and it wasn’t good for me,” Peterson confesses in the interview.

“I don’t tweet so much now. I have two million Twitter subscribers and I felt morally obligated to stay on top of it, but I found the general milieu so toxic that it was not psychologically tolerable.”

That said, he is a supporter of social media in all its untrammelled temerity. His loathing of censorship is held at a deep and theoretical level, but he can take it to extremes.

Thinkspot was partly inspired when the subscription content service Patreon banned anti-feminist British YouTuber Carl Benjamin

After British Labour MP Jess Phillips said she had received rape threats in 2016, Benjamin tweeted: “I wouldn’t even rape you.”

Asked if Benjamin — an unsuccessful UK Independence Party candidate for the European Parliament in the May election — is an indefensible character, Peterson makes a half-hearted defence: remarks can be taken out of context; we all say things we regret.

His real worry, however, is that the main social media platforms are acting as censors and will prove untrustworthy ones. But when it comes to free speech and social media, he admits: “I could be wrong. It’s a tough problem to crack.”

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