The College Fix

A professor known for his refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns was temporarily locked out of his Google account and popular YouTube channel on Tuesday after it was “disabled” without an explanation.

Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto psychology professor, tweeted Tuesday that Google was “refusing to reinstate” his personal account for an apparent violation of the terms of service.

“Google has disabled my main account. No explanation given. Cannot access my YouTube channel,” he wrote on Twitter.

Peterson announced a few hours later that he regained access to his account but hadn’t been given an explanation for the shutdown, which lasted at least two hours.

“Why was it shut down? Who knows Why [sic] did they refuse to reinstate it? Who knows? Why did they turn it back on?” he tweeted.

Peterson said he was unable to upload videos to his YouTube channel, which has more than 350,000 subscribers and includes lectures from Peterson among other videos he’s posted that have collected hundreds of thousands of views.

Here's the images for the shutdown sequence. pic.twitter.com/5elHuAE6DS

— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 1, 2017

Peterson told The Daily Caller News Foundation he’s had the Google account for 15 years and initially thought the blackout was some sort of mishap. Screenshots tweeted by Peterson show he received a message from Google stating his account was “not eligible to be reinstated” because of a violation of the company’s terms of service.

“But 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,” he told the publication.

Neither Peterson nor Google immediately responded to College Fix requests for comment regarding the incident.

Peterson is not the first anti-politically correct or conservative figure to have been blocked from a social media account. Twitter banned anti-feminist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from its platform last year. PragerU, which publishes right-of-center educational programming, has also encountered censorship from YouTube over the content of its videos.

Peterson has gained acclaim as well as criticism for his objections to anti-discrimination legislation that became law this June in Canada and his vow not to use gender-neutral pronouns.

The legislation, introduced last year, adds “gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination” in the Canadian Human Rights Act. It also amends the criminal code “to extend the protection against hate propaganda set out in that Act to any section of the public that is distinguished by gender identity or expression.”

In an op-ed published in The Hill last fall, Peterson referred to the legislation and others like it as “insidious constructions.”

“Careless, ideologically-addled legislators are forcing us to use words we did not freely choose,” he wrote. “We have to draw a line in the sand. That’s why people are watching. It’s a vitally important issue. We cannot afford to get it wrong.”

Peterson has faced blowback for his stand against political correctness. In April, he was disinvited from giving a speech at Oregon’s Linfield College, where he was invited by the school’s Young Americans for Liberty chapter. He was forced to give the talk at an off-campus venue. Around the same time, he was also denied a federal research grant for the first time in his career.

Despite the criticism, Peterson’s defiance toward political correctness has also garnered him a large following and fanbase. He has crowdsourced more than $50,000 per month to create “lectures about profound psychological ideas.”

MORE: Popular prof who refuses to use made-up gender pronouns nets $50K monthly through crowdfunding

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