Dr. Jordan Peterson Announces ThinkSpot, A Free Speech Social Media Platform
The new service will be available to the public as a subscription service later this year.
As reported by Newsbusters, the acclaimed and highly popular Canadian professor Jordan Peterson is going to be launching a social media platform called ThinkSpot.
The professor announced his plans to do so several months prior following the banning of British UKIP MP candidate Carl Benjamen (AKA Sargon of Akkad) from Patreon. As of this coming August, this new service will be available to the public as a subscription service.
Dr. Peterson explained the concept of his new platform in detail on the most recent episode of his podcast with Joe Rogan as his guest. The new platform will serve simultaneously as an all-purpose payment processor and social media platform that won’t block content from any creators shy of those who are breaking the law. This sets the platform aside from recently far more censorious social media platforms and payment processors like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Paypal and even Chase Bank.
The new service has already gained a solid foundation of ideological backers and is beginning its process of beta testing the service this month. As stated by Newsbusters,
Peterson said that a handful of major free speech proponents including Dave Rubin, Michael Shermer, and Carl Benjamin are on board to be beta testers for Thinkspot.
Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila encouraged podcast listeners to sign up as testers for the platform in its current beta phase, before the intended August 2019 launch.
“We’re in desperate need for a platform that doesn’t arbitrarily decide to throw people off because of random crowd mentality,” she said.
For those who would like to help with beta testing the new platform, the website is accepting submissions via a waiting list at http://thinkspot.com.
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Comments
There IS a free speech alternative to Twitter; https://gab.com.
I’m currently running dissenter as my home computer browser. Supposedly it allows you leave comments on ANY website, whether or not they have a comment section. Haven’t figured out how to gain access to that function yet.
I thought the Dissenter comment feature was an add on? I haven’t tried the browser or the add-on yet.
This will fail if it is subscription-based.
I expect you’re right. The success of these social media platforms is dependent upon the network-effect, and having to pay is going to discourage enough people to prevent that from ever kicking in.
One of two things are likely to happen:
1. The next atrocity, e.g. synagogue shooting, they will be deplatformed and go dark like Gab (which seems to duplicate their ideals) – maybe for more than a week.
2. they will be “controlled opposition” and ban or otherwise exclude edgy content “we didn’t mean real nazis”.
Leftist trolls will make accounts and post the most vile things they can think of.
Employees at Google and Apple will use these posts as an excuse to ban the app from their stores.
Now, seeing as Jordan Peterson is an especially intelligent person and is likely going to be working with other especially intelligent people, my hope is they’re planning for just such an eventuality.
Requiring a subscription is a bit of a hurdle because our current society is used to getting its social media for free. That’s how Google, Facebook, and Twitter got where they are, after all. A very low price, say, $0.99 a month or something along those lines may help significantly.
I wish them success. We shall see what happens.
Empirical data shows that subscription decreases readership by a factor of a thousand or more. Not exactly the way to become a public-discourse powerhouse.
Subscription based is a hurdle for sure. Alternative is ad-supported but perhaps that would be too difficult to get big advertisers to take the plunge at start with an unproven audience and likely hostile ideology reasons. I assume this isn’t funded with seven figure VC dollars. So I take it the strategy is to charge a nominal fee to the core audience who presumably is willing to fund the launch. Then if it shows promise, can raise investor money and/or do away with subscriber money and sell ads.
Subscription based is a non-starter
So someone else has to pay for people who want to use it? That’s the problem. Advertisers are too chickensh*t to support anything the left deems a problem so how do you set up a new social network platform? The magic money tree? Find someone with a lot of money and demand that they fund it so you don’t have to?
Concur with Sanddog. You’re not really getting Facebook, Twitter, etc., for free. You are the product being sold. That’s the problem with “free” social media. Twitter, YouTube, etc., have exactly two customers, and their users aren’t one of them. Their customers are the paying advertisers and the governments that set the conditions they have to meet if they want to operate in those markets.
And theses social media types have demonstrated they are perfectly willing to cooperate with police states like China because these countries are markets that are too lucrative to pass up. So in China, they’re willing to be part of the surveillance state that monitors the state slaves as part of their “social credit” system. If you haven’t heard, they assign a “social credit score” to every citizen. If the Chinese (not necessarily by ethnicity such as Han but if you live within the borders) and tow the party line you are allowed to travel abroad, travel by air or high speed rail within the country, make hotel reservations at desirable hotels, etc. If you dissent you get a lower “social credit score.” If you are allowed to travel at all you have to travel at all you have to travel by the slow train that stops at every station. So instead of only spending hours to get to your destination you spend days on the train. Air and travel abroad is forbidden, and you have to stay in filthy hotels in the bad part of town. If your “social credit score” gets too low you can’t travel at all and you are subject to extra police scrutiny.
These social media companies have been called on the carpet by Merkel and the Prime Minister of Pakistan for roughly the same reason. In Germany the government wants all dissent from their open borders policies banned as hate speech. In other words telling the truth about all the problems the mass influx of “refugees” are causing. The massive increase in rape, other crimes, the contempt and hatred for non-Muslims pouring out of mosques, the huge burdens they place on their social welfare systems, and BTW they’re going to be on the dole for life because they don’t have any work skills, speak the language, and they’re not interested in learning.
In Pakistan they were called on the carpet and were told in no uncertain terms if they want to operate their they have to ban “Islamophobic” content. What is Islamophobic content? Citing the Quran, the hadith collections, and the history of Islam which is a history of violence, terrorism, and conquest. In other words, telling the truth. Because under all schools of Islamic jurisprudence slander does not consist of spreading lies about someone or something. It is also telling a truth that someone does not want known. Which is one reason why we’ve seen a wave of bans on conservative content creators. The social media companies have enthusiastically adopted Islamic blasphemy laws. But they don’t just apply the blasphemy laws to criticism of Islam but also to criticism of leftist orthodoxy.
I think that’s too high a price to pay for “free” social media. As the saying goes, nothing is more expensive than a free lunch.
I’d rather pay for a subscription than get something for “free” that requires me to be as serf of China, Pakistan, or the EU.
Note I said “serf…of the EU” and didn’t confine myself to merely Angela Merkel’s Germany. Because if you’re at all critical of Islam or mass migration of third worlders who don’t want to assimilate or work (which they don’t have the education or skills to do, and they have contempt for anyone who says they should acquire them) because they have the entitlement attitude of your average Oberlin student that will get you a visit from the police in any EU country.
Since Britain is still in the EU and apparently their masters in Brussels won’t allow the serfs in Britain to determine their own destiny, I’ll throw a few statistics at you. As of 2016 approximately 900 Muslims were serving in the British armed forces. Meanwhile approximately 2,500 Muslims were in Prison for either attempting to join groups like ISIS or Al Shabab or Boko Haram. A like number had succeeded in traveling to Syria and had joined. Remember the executioner in their beheading videos? He spoke with a British accent. Others were identified as radicalized and had been flagged for police surveillance. If you add it all up we’re talking about approximately 30,000 Muslims who should be in prison or heavily monitored.
Too many, in fact, for the British police to handle. So what do they do instead? Monitor the internet for “hate speech.” Again, people who tell the truth about what’s going on. Truth is the new hate speech. Since the pols have created the situation, and they know they’ve created disaster, they will never admit they’re wrong or change course. So they have to crack down on anyone who tells the truth about what they’ve created.
In Sweden a member of parliament was prosecuted for posting crime statistics that identified perpetrators by place of birth/ethnicity. The Swedish police collect that information, but only select politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists have access to it. That leads to such ludicrous situations as this. Three Muslim “refugees” gang raped a woman on a ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki. They weren’t Swedish citizens or legal refugees or legal residents. In fact, they had only just been in Sweden for a few hours, just long enough to submit their asylum requests which of course hadn’t been approved or even considered yet before they caught the ferry to Finland. How did the press refer to them? As “three Swedish men.”
They had less of a connection to Sweden than I do and I’ve never been to Sweden. But I have at least been to Sveadal as a guest a few times when I was a teenager, an unincorporated community in the Santa Cruz mountains were Americans of Swedish descent have vacation homes. It’s been decades, obviously, but I still remember a couple of phrases; I’m not going to check the spelling but phonetically they’re pronounced “var het het do?” (what’s your name?) and “hun har snug rumpa” (she has a nice butt; sorry ladies but that’s one of the first things a teenaged boy is going to want to learn and if Harvard finds out my application for admission is definitely going to be rejected). So I bet I speak ten times more Swedish than these “three Swedish men.”
Regarding the Swedish MP, he tried to raise the fact that what he said was true as his defense. Remember, though, the Islamic definition of slander. Slander is a truth someone doesn’t want known. The Swedish government doesn’t want the truth to get out to the public. So they, and the rest of the EU has adopted that definition and therefore the truth is no defense and he was duly convicted. In fact the European Court of Human Rights has explicitly said so when a woman of Austria appealed her conviction for hate speech when she, in a private setting (but infiltrated by a leftist “journalist” who infiltrated the private gathering under false pretenses), called Muhammad a pedophile. What else do you call a 54 y.o. man who has sex with a 9 y.o. girl (this is in all the most trusted Islamic sources such as the two Sahih or genuine/authentic collections of hadith which go out of their way to point out Aisha or Muhammad’s favorite child bride/wife had not yet reached puberty)? The ECHR ruled that her right to free speech hadn’t been violated even though what she said is objectively true. The Austrian government had acted “reasonably,” they ruled, because they had a duty, they said, to balance her right to tell the truth against European Muslims’ right not to be offended by hearing the truth. And Muslims make a point by always being offended.
The European governments can’t race fast enough down the road to dhimmitude to reach their goal of forcing their subjects to shut up and only think and speak approved thoughts.
Again, too high a price for “free” social media.
Arminius, I encourage you to sign up for beta testing the platform. I think you’d be valuable help and my hunch is you’d enjoy the work.
I’m interested to learn more about how they’re putting this together from a technology perspective. What’s happening in Silicon Valley is really insidious with the way the big tech players are de-platforming people. Right now we’re mostly seeing it happening with social media accounts and demonetization with revenue sharing schemes. But we’ve seen a few incidents of payment processors cutting companies off. And building web-based software today is orders-of-magnitude faster, easier and cheaper if you use one of the major cloud-computing platforms. How long before they start cutting people off too? I guess there have been isolated incidents, but if the tech giants went full-bore with this approach they could instantly bankrupt and destroy many businesses and lives. The economies of scale and the capital requirements are so massive I just don’t see how anyone can compete at this point. And even if you try to build a system “the old fashioned way (e.g. circa early 2000’s) with some rented rack space in a data center and setting up your own stack, you’re still exposed to the data center, the network provider, ICANN, your payment processor, etc etc etc.
I have concerns like everyone else. Who else is behind this besides Peterson? He’s a smart guy, but not sure he has what it takes to be a tech entrepreneur, that would be a full-time job in itself. And i think he better serves the world with his insights.
Plus are they truly shielded to deal with all the dirty tricks leftists and Silicon Valley are likely to pull. From going after payment providers, to manipulating domain name registrars, etc?
It doesn’t strike me as obvious that SV would engage in any untoward behavior, both from a cost-ben view and from the valley’s decision-making patterns of late. It’d be neither “worth it” nor in character. I think we can safely predict numerous users will, from a motive of political opposition, seek veiled account identities and post purposefully outrageous content. But I also don’t think that will matter much at the end of the cycle. The chaos they splash into the order will do more to spread awareness of the platform than anything else…
For actual users, this appears to be not much different from Quora or even Facebook with respect to “actual freedom experienced.” I would assume most early subscribers would see their fee payment as a tribute in the offering plate and a nod to the absolute necessity of preserving the acceptability granted to the free exchange of ideas. You would still face the prospect of termination from work or school if you post something awful, and I’m not sure how realistic is the fear that there exist so many people who just cannot wait to post such content anyway. Likely many of us disagree with that uncertainty, but if you take trolls and anonymity out of the equation…
This seems to me something like a blend between “a good replacement for Quora” and “a good replacement for Pantheon” and all wrapped up in a collective deep breath from academia wherein they sigh, “It’s about time.”
“[I] think he better serves the world with his insights.”
The days are numbered when he can provide them, considering the current social media platforms have gleefully hopped on the Soviet-style censorship train, and publishers and booksellers and also targets of the rageaholic SJW twitter mobs.
Try to find his books in an airport or some book stores and you find they don’t stock them.
Amazon is under a lot of pressure not too as well, as are Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch as well as other noted “Islamophobes.”
He isn’t going to be operating the service. It’s just that he saw a few years ago which way the wind is blowing and he got together with like-minded free speech tech types to organize this, and those tech types will be running the platform. And, BTW, he’s also warned biologists and other hard science types that they’re going to be next on the hit list because in the age of “transphobia” they won’t be allowed to report on sex differences or even study them. It is leftist dogma that they’re are no such thing as sex differences and it is heresy to say that their are.
Welcome to Lysenkoism v2.0.
“ThinkSpot”? I’m sorry, but that’s a terrible name for several reasons. (“See Spot think. Think, Spot, think.”) (“You got a ThinkSpot on your clothes again.” “Darn it!!”) (“Go to your room, and find your ThinkSpot so you can think about what you’ve done, young man!!”) (Etc..)
One of the problems with challenging the liberal platforms is that they’ve got great names (except for maybe “Twitter”). Facebook, Google, YouTube…they are all simple, short, and sweet, and their names (aside from “Google”, though it has almost become synonymous with “Search Engine”) convey what they about, without being embarrassing or insulting (unlike, say, “Gab”, or “DuckDuckGo”).
“…convey what they are about…”