Jordan Peterson has publicly thanked Elon Musk after his Twitter account was reinstated on Friday (18 November).
Back in June, Peterson made transphobic comments about actor Elliot Page, leading to his removal from the social media platform.
But ahead of the weekend, the Canadian clinical psychologist returned to Twitter, tweeting: “I'm back. Thanks @elonmusk,” alongside a photo of Jack Nicholson’s famous ‘here’s Johnny’ scene in The Shining.
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Musk himself tweeted about the move, writing: “Kathie Griffin, Jorden Peterson & Babylon Bee have been reinstated. Trump decision has not yet been made.”
While Musk may have welcomed Peterson back to Twitter, he’s not yet mastered the spelling of the controversial figure’s name.
Earlier this month, Griffin had her account suspended for changing her name to ‘Elon Musk’ after the Tesla CEO warned users of his newly-purchased platform that they’d be booted off it if they pretend to be someone else.
Like Peterson, The Babylon Bee - a conservative-leaning parody site - was banned earlier this year for violating Twitter's hateful conduct policies.
Back in June, Peterson wrote a transphobic tweet about Page.
His comment was a reply to an article shared by the New York Post in which Page said he’s proud to introduce a transgender character to Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy.
Not only did he deadname Page, but Peterson also said the actor had his 'breasts removed by a criminal physician'.
Twitter flagged the post for 'violating rules against hateful conduct' and asked the author to take it down, which he said he would ‘rather die’ than do, hence his removal from the platform.
Wading in on the controversy, Musk said Twitter went ‘way too far’ in suspending Peterson over his comments about Page.
When asked: “Did you see that JBP was recently banned from the bird app? Strange times,” Musk replied: “Yeah, they’re going way too far in squashing dissenting opinions.”
If recent news is anything to go by, Musk might not have a social media platform to reinstate Trump on.
Earlier this week, Twitter employees were told to agree to Musk’s ‘hardcore’ way of working or walk away from their jobs with three months severance pay.
In response to Musk’s ultimatum, there were mass walkouts which included engineers responsible for preventing outages.
Reuters reported that many of those departures included engineers who had worked on ‘fixing bugs and preventing service outages’, which means there are now questions about the ‘stability of the platform'. Yikes.
Aisha Nozari