Did Jordan Peterson purposely get suspended from Twitter to generate publicity?
On June 22 Jordan Peterson tweeted “Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.” Twitter suspended him a week later, advising him that he could get back on Twitter simply by removing the tweet. He then proceeded to make a YouTube video about it on his YouTube channel because this event was of such monumental importance to him that it deserved a 15-minute response. In the video he said that he “would rather die” than remove the tweet.
Peterson’s video was filled with predictable rationalization and hyperbole. The hubris behind it bordered on self-parody, and it was little more than a textbook example of motivated reasoning in action. I left a comment in the comment section, musing that his Twitter suspension suspiciously coincided with the Daily Wire’s announcement that he was joining their network. Getting suspended from Twitter and generating outrage over it among his fanbase seemed like a great way to create publicity. Was it all just a coincidence? I wondered.
Peterson responded by pinning my comment at the very top of the comment section, as if to say “look at this crazy ideologue and conspiracy theorist who thinks I got suspended from Twitter on purpose! Such nonsense!”. Although there’s no way to find out whether he did or didn’t deliberately attempt to get suspended from Twitter, there are many good reasons to think he meant to do so. Here are those reasons, listed below.
(1) Peterson’s first rise to fame in 2016 occurred through controversy
In 2016 Peterson was still a professor at the University of Toronto. Protests erupted on campus over his public refusal to use his students’ preferred pronouns. Those protests were filmed and published on his YouTube channel, which had existed for a long time already and had tons of videos on it. None had any significant view counts until this event. Suddenly he catapulted to fame and started appearing everywhere. Through this event Peterson must have learned that generating protest from the woke was an effective way to raise his public profile. In fact, he said so explicitly two years later.
(2) Peterson admitted to Joe Rogan that he knows how to monetize “Social Justice Warriors”
In 2018 Peterson became prominent enough that he appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience, the biggest podcast on earth. In that conversation, he candidly explained to Rogan that he knew how to monetize “Social Justice Warriors”. The way it worked was simple: the outrage against him from SJWs would draw attention to him and lead him to gain more supporters.
Peterson framed it as a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma for the SJWs because if they protested against him then he would get more publicity, but if they didn’t he would get to speak at various venues and spread his message, which they didn’t like. It’s clear he understood that if he did anything that motivated woke activists to try to de-platform him, then it would bring him new supporters and more attention.
(3) Peterson’s tweet was an obvious violation of its Terms of Service
Twitter’s Terms of Service are no secret, but most people are unlikely to read them when they join Twitter. Still, anyone who pays attention to culture war politics, like Peterson does, knows that certain things will get you suspended or banned from Twitter. One of these is transphobia, and it can happen even if you say something innocuous on its face if the underlying sentiment behind it is to deny the validity of trans identities. This is what happened to Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist Meghan Murphy when she tweeted “women aren’t men”. Although this statement is innocuous if taken literally, in the context in which she wrote this she was saying that trans women aren’t women. It earned her a permanent ban.
Peterson violated Twitter’s Terms of Service when he deadnamed Elliot Page by referring to him as “Ellen Page”, Page’s previous identity before he came out as a trans man. You can find the rule against this sort of behavior in Twitter’s Hateful Conduct Policy. Simply type Ctrl-F and the word “deadnaming” to find the policy spelled out in plain English. Personally, I’ve been aware of this policy from Twitter for some time, and I don’t even use Twitter. It’s just well-known that Twitter will suspend people for making anti-trans tweets, like deadnaming trans people.
(4) Peterson had never tweeted anything so anti-trans before
Among some, Peterson is known as a person who promotes bigotry against trans people, or is anti-trans himself. However, his previous positions on trans issues never went as far as calling a surgeon “criminal” for performing gender-affirming surgery on a consenting adult of sound mind.
The initial controversy that brought Peterson to fame was not clearly the result of any intolerance Peterson harboured towards trans people. In several interviews where he was asked to clarify his views, Peterson said that he wasn’t opposed to using trans people’s preferred pronouns, but he wouldn’t use neo-pronouns like “xe” and “xir” because he thought they originated from “post-modern neo-Marxism”, a philosophical worldview he said he detested. Setting aside whether post-modern neo-Marxism is an existing philosophy with real-world adherents, much of Peterson’s discussion around pronouns ended up being focused on his opposition to proposed human rights legislation in Canada.
Peterson repeatedly framed his opposition to Canada’s human rights law, at the time proposed in a bill called Bill C-16, as opposition to compelled speech rather than trans rights because he interpreted the law as requiring people to use others’ preferred pronouns or be charged with a hate crime. Later on he stopped saying “hate crime” because he likely realized that that was just flatly incorrect hyperbole, but he still repeatedly pointed out that you could face a possible human rights claim for misgendering someone. He based his interpretation on the similar provincial law that already existed in his home province of Ontario. For the record, neither I nor the Canadian Bar Association agree with Peterson’s interpretation.
Although Peterson’s attention to Bill C-16 seemed a bit suspicious (why focus on that as opposed to the myriad other political issues of the day?), it at least gave him the excuse that he was really taking a principled stance against limitations on freedom of speech and was not motivated by bigotry against trans people themselves.
Prior to this tweet, Peterson had never, to my knowledge, uttered a phrase that so heavily implied that he thought trans people’s identities weren’t valid. Choosing to deadname a famous trans person and calling their surgeon “criminal” is an extreme viewpoint to take. The idea that gender-affirming surgeries are harmful to trans people is also contrary to scientific evidence on the issue, and scientific evidence is something Peterson has often claimed to be in favour of.
In short, Peterson’s tweet seemed inconsistent with his prior stated views on trans issues. It also seemed somewhat out of character, but then again Peterson had posted a fairly inflammatory tweet only two months before that.
(5) Peterson was getting tired of Twitter and seemed increasingly ready to leave the platform
Two months before his tweet about Elliot Page, Peterson tweeted about the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue’s decision to feature plus-sized model Yumi Nu on its cover, saying “Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.” The tweet was remarkable for its mean-spirited nature. It was also remarkable for its hubris, as though Peterson is the one true arbiter of what is or isn’t beautiful, for all of humanity.
Unsurprisingly, Peterson’s tweet about Yumi Nu brought him significant blowback. He responded by rationalizing on YouTube, just like he did with the Elliot Page tweet. He also responded by saying he would be leaving Twitter. Yet he didn’t do so, which plenty of people noticed. It wouldn’t be surprising if he was still unsure whether he wanted to pull the plug, but preferred to do so by getting suspended so he could be “cancelled” for the publicity.
(6) Peterson’s reply to my pinned comment on his YouTube video only increases suspicion
I was surprised that Peterson decided to pin my comment where I suggested that he might’ve purposely gotten suspended from Twitter for the publicity. I was even more surprised that he replied to my comment, saying the following:
You’ll notice that a week went by post-Tweet before Twitter acted. Are you suggesting that I orchestrated the fact that Twitter banned me the same day I partnered with Daily Wire? How could I possibly do that? Sorry: that was just luck on my part — and stupidity on theirs.
What’s interesting about his reply is how it’s such a poor refutation of the idea that he might have purposely gotten suspended from Twitter for the publicity. It turned out that he got suspended on the exact same day he announced he was partnering with the Daily Wire, a fact I wasn’t aware of until Peterson mentioned it in his reply. Assuming that his Daily Wire announcement was scheduled well in advance to occur on that day, there was indeed no way he could have timed that so well.
The problem for Peterson is that he wrote the tweet a week before he announced his new partnership with the Daily Wire. Had he been attempting to get kicked off of Twitter, writing an inflammatory tweet calculated to do so only a week before his Daily Wire announcement would have been very good timing. It just turns out that Twitter took a week to issue the suspension rather than doing it right away. There’s also no question his announcement about the Daily Wire was already in the works. One doesn’t join a media organization on a whim without prior negotiations first.
For this reason, Peterson’s non-refutation actually made me more suspicious, not less. Strategically, it’s actually pretty effective for him to have highlighted someone’s comment questioning whether his behaviour was authentic. By drawing attention to it, he was confidently dismissing it. Many people would reason that if his tweet was a cynical attempt at generating publicity, then they would not have expected him to draw attention to the idea that that’s what he was doing. In my view, however, by doing so he actually made it seem more likely that he was trying to get suspended from Twitter simply because the man doth protest too much.
Final Thoughts
Some of Peterson’s fans reacted with glee when he pinned my YouTube comment, calling it the “pin of shame” and pointing out that my comment was “ratioed” (i.e. the ratio of likes to my comment was dwarfed by the likes for Peterson’s reply). Setting aside whether it’s impressive if a YouTuber ratios a comment about one of their own YouTube videos in a comment section populated by their own fans, the ratio is actually not particularly strong in Peterson’s favour as I write this. Right now, my comment has 2.8K likes while his reply has 3.1K likes.
Peterson’s fans also seemed to take exception to my use of the word “inflammatory” to describe his tweet. They assumed this meant I found his tweet personally offensive, and they took the opportunity to try to rub salt in it. A well-entrenched narrative on the right is that those on the left are too sensitive and too easily offended, which doesn’t describe me in the least. I wasn’t personally offended by it, but I do recognize that it is offensive to the world at large and to Twitter users in particular because they tend to lean woke. That’s what I meant when I said his tweet was “inflammatory”.
Whether it was a calculated move by Peterson or not, his Twitter suspension and reaction to it seems to have had the effect of generating lots of publicity for him. His video about his Twitter suspension, disingenuously titled “Twitter Ban” (a suspension is not a ban), currently has 3 million views and counting. This is quite a few more views than the view count for most of his videos since he came back into the public eye after recovering from his benzodiazepine addiction. In the last few months, his YouTube videos have tended to garner between 200,000 and~1.5 million views.
Ultimately, I have no way of knowing what Peterson’s motivations were, and can’t really draw any firm conclusions either way. What was more remarkable, for me, was the extreme viewpoint behind his tweet and the absurdity of him going on YouTube to angrily complain for 15 minutes straight about his Twitter suspension.
Still, part of me would prefer it if he didn’t mean what he said in the tweet. If Peterson didn’t just tweet something offensive to try to get suspended from Twitter, that might actually be worse. It means he fully believed in his tweet where he denied a trans man’s identity and called the physician who performed surgery on him “criminal”. I suppose with viewpoints like that, he’ll fit right in at the far-right Daily Wire.
I’ve often defended Peterson to my leftie friends. Over the years, I’ve found myself to be a reluctant fan of his. Much of what he says is wrong, or garbage, but he also says plenty of interesting and useful things. For example, I agree with one of his central points that it’s better to pursue meaning in life than happiness. I also listened to an episode of his podcast where he interviewed a man who endured over a decade of torture and imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay, and it was one of the best podcasts I’d ever heard. I’m comfortable separating the wheat from the chaff for any public figure I pay attention to. However, this latest hate tweet and outburst from him made me lose almost all remaining respect I had for him.
Looking at his recent behaviour, it’s all the more incredible that Peterson was once described as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world” by New York Times columnist David Brooke. It’s hard to imagine someone being described as a “public intellectual” at all when they behave like the equivalent of a schoolchild who had their favourite toy taken away from them after being suspended from a social media platform. How pathetic.
