Jordan Peterson’s Thinkspot Probably Isn’t about “Free Speech”

“It makes sense to frame the issue as being about free speech, however, because it is likely seen as a much more worthwhile cause.”

A few days ago, Jordan Peterson announced that he will be launching a content creation and monetization platform called Thinkspot, which he talked about with the website NewsBusters. His selling pitch is that it will be radically pro-free speech, even saying that the only way a user could be kicked off the platform would be if a U.S. court orders the site to do it. This, of course, fits nicely into the sort of online (and on campus) cultural war which conservatives and other more radical right-wing groups, such as the alt-right, identify as an effort to silence them. They point to cases such as Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, being kicked off the popular monetization site Patreon, and users being banned from Twitter for telling fired ex-HuffPo journalists to “learn to code.” All of this is cited in the NewsBusters piece with Peterson as part of the context leading the launching of Thinkspot, which will allow creators to be directly compensated by users.

The first issue here is that none of that has anything to do with free speech, but with platforming, which are not the same. This might seem like an obvious argument, and that is not the core of the argument that I want to make; but I believe it is important to get it out of the way first. It makes sense to frame the issue as being about free speech, however, because it is likely seen as a much more worthwhile cause. That is also not to say that free speech and platforming are not related, but free speech on its own can only be related to state censorship. If we started to accept that private entities such as individuals or companies can violate free speech, it would imply that the State has the right to compel individuals to, for example, give someone a platform against their will, which is a rather clear violation of basic liberal democratic principles. That being said, I do think that there are arguments to be made in favor of platforming, and I have made them before elsewhere. But even if we grant that this project is really about platforming and not about free speech, there are several issues with the conservative and alt-right discourse that this matter exposes.

Before fully getting into the subject matter, it should be pointed out that, while deplatforming of conservatives has occurred on several occasions, it is hardly the one-sided issue that is often made out to be. In fact, according to The Heterodox Academy, a database of university professor firings put together by Jeff Sachs indicates that the Left should be as concerned by this issue as the right, if not more. Of course social media deplatforming is different from university firings, but it is, nonetheless part of the same culture of censorship decried by conservatives. Moreover, the same article by The Heterodox Academy points to the fact that liberal or left-wing professors face the same kind of online harassment on social media that conservatives do. This is just meant to show that the truth about deplatforming is much more nuanced than it is often made out to be. The point of all this brief detour from the main topic is not just to show that the situation is more complex than it appears. The fact that it is not one-sided is quite relevant when it comes to showing why the whole idea for this platform is built on a fundamentally flawed premise.