Jordan Peterson Close To Launching "Anti-Censorship" Social Media Platform

[Swordsmyth]

Psychologist and author Jordan B. Peterson announced this week that progress on Thinkspot, his subscription-based "anti-censorship" social media platform, has the project closer to launch.
Peterson and his team are beta testing the product, which he calls “an intellectual playground for censorship-free discourse”, according to the Washington Times (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/12/jordan-b-peterson-launching-anti-censorship-platfo/). It comes at a time when social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Pinterest have been accused of arbitrarily enforcing vague terms of service and overreaching in their left-wing biased policing of their respective platforms.
“Announcing Thinkspot: a new online communication platform (as promised post-Patreon),” Peterson wrote Wednesday on Facebook.
https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/inline-images/JP.png


Recall, just days ago, we reported (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-11/pinterest-bans-zero-hedge-adding-porn-domain-block-list-used-target-conservatives) that documents leaked to Project Veritas (https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/11/tech-insider-blows-whistle-on-how-pinterest-listed-top-pro-life-site-as-porn-bible-verses-censored/) by a Pinterest insider reveal that the San Francisco-based social media company has blocked links from Zero Hedge and several conservative or religious-based websites - adding them to a 'porn domain block list' originally intended to keep the platform free of sexually explicit material.
Peterson began to take a stand against social media when YouTuber Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, was removed from Patreon in December 2018. Benjamin's "infraction" came as a result of him actually mocking his racist critics on another platform by using a racial epithet.
On the June 9 Joe Rogan podcast, Peterson describes platform by saying: “Once you’re on our platform we won’t take you down unless we’re ordered to by a US court of law.”


More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-13/jordan-peterson-close-launching-anti-censorship-social-media-platform-0

[r3volution 3.0]

Hey look at that, creating an alternative with your own resources, as the market allows you to do, rather than going cap in hand to Uncle Sugar.

[Zippyjuan]

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/jordan-petersons-platform-will-shadowban-unpopular-opinions.html


Jordan Peterson’s Online Platform Will Shadowban Unpopular Opinions

<snip>
On his podcast this week, speaking with guest Joe Rogan, Peterson outlined how he planned to keep Thinkspot from spiraling out of control: a minimum word count. “If minimum comment length is 50 words, you’re gonna have to put a little thought into it,” Peterson said, as recapped by the right-wing site NewsBusters. “Even if you’re being a troll, you’ll be a quasi-witty troll.” I’m maybe a little more skeptical that Peterson and Rogan’s crowd — the one that spends hours at a time watching men yell into a microphone on YouTube — will have trouble coming up with 50 words to fill space.

Even weirder was Peterson’s reveal that the site will hide downvoted comments. “If your ratio of upvotes to downvotes falls below 50-50, then your comments will be hidden. People will still be able to see them if they click, but you’ll disappear,” he said. What Peterson described is a completely valid form of site moderation. The tactic is also what conservatives have often misconstrued as “shadowbanning.”

Shadowbanning used to mean that a user’s posts would remain visible to the user but were otherwise entirely hidden from the website. It’s a way of getting people to leave on their own by removing the feedback loop of getting reactions from other users.

But a sloppily worded Vice News article about Twitter from last year has muddied the definition. The report pointed out that certain members of the GOP weren’t showing up in Twitter’s auto-suggest function. Everywhere else on the site, though, these accounts were visible, and users could see their posts. Vice erroneously labeled this process “shadowbanning,” and the term made it all the way to the president’s tweets.

In reality, Twitter was doing the type of quality control that nearly all websites practice: gating certain users a little bit more, based on feedback and signals from other users. Thinkspot, by Peterson’s own admission, appears to function the same way, which is ironic given the professor’s stance as a free-speech absolutist. Making bad comments and bad users just a little bit harder to find in order to improve the user experience is apparently censorship on major platforms. On Peterson’s own site, it’s just quality control.

[Anti Globalist]

Hope that platform ends up being really successful.