Thinkspot

About

Thinkspot is an upcoming social media platform founded by Jordan Peterson, who describes the site as a "free speech platform" that will refrain from censoring users unless they have been ordered by a court of law.

History

On June 9th, 2019, an episode of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast was released featuring an interview with Joe Rogan (shown below). During the podcast, Peterson discussed his upcoming free speech platform, claiming that “once you're on our platform we won't take you down unless we’re ordered to by a US court of law.”

Additionally, Peterson discussed the platform as a "subscription service" to be a partial competitor to Patreon and described how the comment system would work, stating that there might be a minimum comment length of 50 words and that comments with an unfavorable ratio of upvotes to downvotes would be hidden unless clicked.

The following day, Peterson tweeted about the platform, announcing that it is currently in a beta test period (shown below starting at 1:23).^[3] Within four days, the tweet gained over 5,000 likes and 1,100 retweets.

Online Reaction

On June 12th, 2019, NY Mag^[2] published an article titled "Jordan Peterson's Online Platform Will Shadowban Unpopular Opinions." In the article, author Brian Feldman describes Thinkspot as "a place for people who know how to be racist in sexist in a more dog-whistle-y way" and described the site's feature of hiding downvoted comments as a type of shadowbanning.

The following day, YouTuber Tim Pool uploaded a video titled "Jordan Peterson Smeared Before He Even Launched ThinkSpot" (shown below).

Meanwhile, posts mocking the platform appeared on the /r/ChapoTrapHouse^[4] and /r/GamerGhazi^[5] subreddits.

Search Interest

External References