Camestros Felapton

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I visited the Jordan Peterson new social media platform

Back in June self-help guru Jordan Peterson announced his own new social media platform called “thinkspot” dedicated to “free speech”. I said at the time that it was likely to go the same way as the alt-right Twitter alternative Gab (see https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/06/13/jordan-petersons-new-version-of-gab-will-have-all-the-same-problems-as-gab/ ).

Having signed up sometime ago out of morbid curiosity, I finally received an invite to the Beta version yesterday. Seeing what has been built, I have to reverse my previous opinion. I don’t think thinkspot will necessarily go the same way as Gab i.e. become so overwhelmed with the worst parts of the net as to be abandoned even by the not-quite-the-worst parts of the net.

What is much less clear is what thinkspot is supposed to be. Perhaps the biggest and most obvious difference with other platforms is that thinkspot does at least have a clear business model other than advertising. You can join for free but a free account has very limited features. That “free” part in “free speech” does not mean “free” in the money sense. If you want to post your own content then you have to buy a subscription.

The more basic Platform Subscription costs $2.50 billed annually i.e. $30. That $30 buys you:

“Access to all Contributor forums

Your own thinkspot user page, includes unique posting privileges and verified icon

Exclusive ts. videos, livestreams, and podcasts

Coming soon:Upload your own podcasts and video blogs, start discussion groups, and create newsletters even eBooks.”

If you are thinking that $30 sounds a bit steep you aren’t going to want to click on the other offer. “Contributor” isn’t another level where you get to be a contributor but rather it is another level where you pay an extra fee to subscribe to a contributor. The current list is as follows: [links from me to Wikipedia bios]

Those seven are the contributors you can subscribe to but there appears to be 20 contributors in total including Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila.

I’ll acknowledge that for once we have something that looks like practical consistency of thought from Peterson. The man loves hierarchies and that’s what he has implemented. Essentially there are four levels.

  1. Basic users – free and you get to write comments on things other people write.
  2. Platform subscribers – $30 a year and you get your own page and you can write things there.
  3. Subscribers to contributors – a minimum of an extra $30 a year per contributor you subscribe to. This gets you additional content.
  4. Contributors. How somebody gets to be a contributor is unclear but you can get paid.

So this thinkspot is very much NOT a Facebook or a Twitter alternative. Joining gets you all the privileges of being in the comment section of other people’s content. A better analogy would be with the long-form blogging platform Medium — which itself is a bit vague about what it is supposed to be.

The pay-walls at least do mean thinkspot is unlikely to follow the same path as Gab. The people the platform cares about (the Contributors) are shielded. I don’t know if they can de-subscribe a user they don’t like but at worst if they were being hassled by trolls those trolls would be paying the Contributor for the privilege.

The platform is (and I’m being as generous as possible) a confusing mess. When you start there is a kind of step-by-step guide which is unhelpful. From the get-go I am automatically made a follower of all 20 of the Contributors. That means I’m greeted with a feed/timeline of posts with next to no context from these 20 people. I’m not sure what I get in addition if I subscribe to a contributor as well. I decided to make my experience less confusing and unfollow somebody.

I picked “Bishop Barron” on the grounds that like most of the names I’d never heard of him [“Bishop Robert Barron is the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles”] and unfollowed the Bishop. That helped a lot as it made clear the difference between different kinds of Contributors. You can use the Bishop’s forum for free, whereas Jordan Peterson’s forum you have to pay for. By the way Peterson himself isn’t actually posting to thinkspot currently. As of October 16 his pinned post says:

“Jordan is still taking some time off, but is expecting to return soon. In the meantime, his team will continue posting his previously prepared content and works in order to keep the thinkspot vision going. Thank you all for your continued support!”

So I wouldn’t spend that $240 yet…OK I wouldn’t spend it at all.

What about the site’s commitment to free speech? The site has a long statement that is linked from its Terms of Service https://www.ts.today/home/speech_statement It starts like this:

“At thinkspot, we believe that the life-blood of the great democratic project is ensconced foremost in ideas and the uninhibited articulation of thought. The innate human affinity for inquiry, reflection, and opinion are natural complements to the concept of ideas, yet the battle over their latitude in society seems to be eternal. So while ideas intrinsically are essential to our existence, it is the context with which they exercise influence that holds equal if not greater significance. It is our team’s conviction that without fertile ground for free expression, our purest exhibition of free will congeals into a reductive calcification, whereby misleading rhetoric is weaponized by autocrats, monoliths, and those who privilege power over principle. “

…and carries on in much the same way, extolling the virtues of free-speech yet somehow never really saying anything.

The Community Guidelines provide a clearer idea of what they mean in practice. “Free speech” is explained in terms of the US First Amendment and US law i.e. if it is speech that you can be sued for or prosecuted for in the US then it is not free speech but something else. I’m not a lawyer or a US constitutional expert but then I’m not sure the author of the community guidelines is either. There are warnings about the following things that can be removed:

  • Copyright infringement etc
  • Defamation
  • Obscentity
  • Pornography
  • Incitement and Fighting Words
  • Terrorism
  • CyberStalking/Harassment
  • Doxing
  • Brigading
  • Spam
  • Impersonation
  • A bunch of other prohibited transactions (e.g. selling stolen goods)

The list is not a surprise — whether it is Twitter or Gab, the primary motivation for a platform to moderate content is the platform’s legal liability. The question is more how the platform will police things and who they will police.

The defamation clause is an interesting example:

“Defamation
Defamation, a false statement about another that tends to damage the reputation of that person, is not protected by the First Amendment. Any defaming language that plainly contravenes U.S. law is forbidden and will be removed.”

Gab (and I think WordPress as well) insisted that they would take down defamatory content only if there was a court ruling. What is or is not defamation in the US is unclear (not just the US obviously). So it is not a matter of simply applying some simple legal criteria and removing posts/comments that break the defamation-law. That’s not how laws on defamation work. Having said that, the guideline implies a more useful standard of removing content that appears to be defamatory.

Of course, whether the sites moderators will do so is another question.

Overall, thinkspot is a service for its Contributors. A contributor gets a moderated comment section and a possible income stream. Low level users get moderated, Contributor’s get “free speech”. The site reflects the Petersonian view of the natural order of things: the big important guy gets to say what they want without censure or criticism, the proles get to listen politely.

P.S. My invite comes with the privilege of sending out 10 free invites to others. If you want one, just ask in the comments and I’ll send it to whatever your comment email address is (or email me if you want it to a different email). I’m not sure why you might want one other than morbid curiosity but you then get 10 free invites also. Gosh! It’s like some sort of scheme that is shaped like a pyramid…

camestrosfelapton

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41 responses to “I visited the Jordan Peterson new social media platform”

  1. I’ll pass on the invite, I’d rather spend a soggy Saturday in Skeggy than visit this LobsterBook 🙂

    I guess the barrier to entry will stop the whatever the equivalent of your “feed” section ala Twitter and Facebook being a cesspit, but I’d put money on the comments either being a barren wasteland (if no-one joins) or an unusable hive of scum and villainy.

    Liked by 4 people

  2. Wow. I compliment you for putting in so much research on something like this.
    “It is our team’s conviction that without fertile ground for free expression, our purest exhibition of free will congeals into a reductive calcification” Statements like this from arrogant jackasses such as Peterson make me wonder how long before he pulls a Brett Stephens and starts shrieking about people being mean to him.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. So by his own standards, he has to remove himself for the defamatory things he’s on record saying about trans people.

    Not going to hold my breath for that.

    Liked by 2 people

    • I think maybe the third post I found (not from JBP) was a pile of transphobic crap. That’s essentially what they mean by ‘free speech’ – free to spread lies about groups of people they dislike.

      This was from a “Heather Macdonald” who is one of their star contributors. The other post of hers I read was a complaint about women being admitted to STEM courses but framed that diversity was a Chinese plot (aside from the headline and the initial framing, she doesn’t connect any of what she then writes to China) ” Could China be infiltrating America’s STEM education to undermine its competitiveness? It’s a tempting theory when one observes the relentless and growing obsession with “diversity” on the part of every professional STEM organization as well as every science funding institution in the federal government. ” !

      Liked by 2 people

    • Speaking of stinkpots, I eagerly await Thinkspot’s newest contributor, Pee Pee Poopoo Man.

      (That would be the guy they just arrested for throwing buckets of liquified feces at people on the U of T and York University classes. No, I don’t know why it’s not “Pee Pee Poo Poo Man” but I don’t make these things up. As far as I know there is no actual Jordan Peterson connection.)

      Liked by 3 people

      • Actually, two of the throwings were in libraries: one at U of T’s Robarts library and one at York’s Scott Library. Utterly charming fellow.

        Liked by 3 people

      • I had meant to write “campuses.” But yeah, two were at libraries. The third that I’m aware of was near University and College (so either on the edge of the U of T campus or right outside it).

        Liked by 2 people

  6. The site reflects the Petersonian view of the natural order of things: the big important guy gets to say what they want without censure or criticism, the proles get to listen politely.

    No, thank you. I see quite enough a-holes like that in the world. I’m not about to pay to listen to another one. 🙄

    Liked by 2 people

  7. Kind of nice that they are isolating themselves to their own platforms to lessen their reach and influence. I’m okay with that.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. If I were to say that Jordan Peterson is an intellectual lightweigth, or a loon, or a grifter, or something to that effect, would the moderators on his site consider that a false statement that damages Peterson’s reputation?

    The relatively wide and vague definition they give of defamation sets them up for a trap: The moderators’ personal opinions about a statement – and about what reputation someone have to loose – will amost certainly influence their decision on whether criticism is defamatory.

    Liked by 3 people

  9. So I read the previous post from when Peterson announced the site. Back then, Peterson said that “once you’re on our platform we won’t take you down unless we’re ordered to by a US court of law.” Now they say “Any defaming language that plainly contravenes U.S. law is forbidden and will be removed.” – i.e. while they still reference US law, they have removed the requirement of a court order and allows the site moderators to pass judgment on their own. That’s an, ehm, interesting change of mind.

    (The blind faith in US law is weird, by the way. It’s one thing to say something like “As a company based in the US we have to follow court orders”, but referring to US law as if it contains the One and True Answer to the question of what is and what isn’t protected free speech is simply close-minded and un-intellectual. In particular from a Canadian, and in particular considering the slight problems we’re currently seeing with democracy in USA.

    The announcement also promises that the site will have a minimum word limit – an attempt to force people to present an argument and not just throw obscenities – and a down-/upvote system. Are there any signs of those features at the moment?

    Liked by 1 person

    • Isn’t it interesting how, when the desire to make make money conflicts with their principles, it’s the money that wins?

      Liked by 3 people

    • I took it to mean that his funding and/or developers were in the US. The Canadian right does have a bit of a USA fetish, but at the same time Canadian developers would be a little less clueless. Maybe not a lot, I admit.

      Liked by 2 people

      • In theory I suppose they might be: Canadian privacy and workplace laws are significantly different from the U.S., as are the Human Rights Code and hate speech laws.

        That said, you probably underestimate just how much Canadian culture is inundated with U.S.-made news and entertainment. Combine that with the echo chamber effect where people choose their news channels based on pre-existing political leaning, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all that most of the folks on the Canadian right (likely aside from the people trying to run things, who have reason to lie about it to whip people up) have no idea just how different things are.

        I mean, heck, we have Freeman-on-the-Land types here in Canada who use exactly the same Sovereign Citizen rhetoric as the U.S…. including the ‘fringe on the flag means this is an admiralty court and doesn’t apply to me’ bit, which applies even less in Canada than it does in the U.S. (It doesn’t actually apply in the U.S.; in Canada, some of the legal concepts being applied aren’t just being applied wrong, they’re non-existent.)

        (Not that we’re lacking in such. One of the most commonly cited documents that defined such ‘Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument [“OPCA”] Litigants’ was a 2012 legal document from a judge in Edmonton, Alberta: https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc/2012/2012abqb571/2012abqb571.html where the judge went into exactly the sort of hundreds-of-paragraphs of cited and defined legal and historical detail that you might expect in a judgement.)

        Liked by 1 person

      • @Camestros:
        Doesn’t surprise me at all. One of the things explicitly noted in that OPCA Litigants file was just how much of the Sovereign Citizen/Freemen on the Land movements are controlled by ‘gurus’ who promise to teach you how to get out of paying taxes or child support or other things. It’s pretty much become a multi-level marketing or affinity scam targeting people who have grievances against the government. As such, the idea that common materials would be used even outside of the contexts in which they were originally supposed to apply is pretty much inevitable.

        Of course, what they really teach is disrespect and delaying actions. They’re the legal version of a Gish Gallop, and set up to abuse the assumption of good faith the court usually tries to give people. In the cases where the guru actually understands they’ve been giving out misinformation, this usually gives time for the guru to get clear. The document I mentioned deliberately tried to catalogue and categorize such actions so as to give judges a heads-up on when someone is trying to play on the system in this way.

        Liked by 2 people

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