Google Temporarily Bans Professor Who Rejects Political Correctness

University of Toronto Professor Jordan B. Peterson told The Daily Caller this week that his YouTube and Google accounts were temporarily locked down with no forthcoming reason given by the online media giants. Peterson, who has developed a reputation for being one of the few academics willing to criticize the social justice nonsense trumpeted by the left, suspects that his controversial views had something to do with the now-lifted (but still unexplained) ban.

“Please tell me what principle I have violated,” Peterson said in an email to Google. “I have not violated any terms that I am aware of and have not misused my account.”

Peterson, who has had the account for 15 years, said he initially thought the block was due to a mistake. But in its only meaningful correspondence with him, Google made it clear that was not the case.

“We understand you’ve recently been unable to access your Google account, and we appreciate you contacting us,” the tech company said in response to Peterson’s email. “After review, your account is not eligible to be reinstated due to a violation of our Terms of Service.”

“The fact that they reviewed it and then decided that my account is not eligible to be reinstated indicates to me either that this is quite a curious mistake or that there’s something that’s political going on that is associated with censorship,” Peterson told The Daily Caller in an interview. “This is just another example of these big companies that either [kowtow] to pressure…or deciding on their own accord who gets to communicate and who doesn’t.”

When hours passed without satisfaction, the professor used Twitter to call out to some of his prominent friends in the online community.

“Google is refusing to reinstate my account,” he wrote Tuesday. “Violation of terms of service. No explanation given.”

He tagged Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Steven Crowder, and Dave Rubin in his tweets, hoping that their widespread audiences would bring pressure on Google to change its mind.

Apparently, the gambit worked because Google gave Peterson back his accounts by the end of the day, bringing an end to what might have become an extremely disturbing example of selective censorship. According to the professor, the company has still given him no indication as to why he was originally blocked.

Peterson’s primary focus online has been in discussing the perils of moral relativism and giving illuminating lectures on modern Biblical perceptions, but he has attracted the ire of “progressives” with his opposition to Canada’s recent C-16 bill. The bill, which gives the government the authority to prosecute citizens for improperly “mis-gendering” someone, was correctly perceived by Peterson to be an enormous step into Looneyville.

“I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words ‘zhe’ and ‘zher,’” he said at the time. “These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.”

Google and other Silicon Valley companies are rushing to be at the vanguard of these new, idiotic social justice movements, so it’s not surprising that they would despair at the idea of a professor lashing out against political correctness in this way. But if they are going to start pushing the censorship button whenever they run across what they consider “hate speech,” the internet as we know it will soon be changed forever.