‘Any critic of yours online gets absolutely lambasted by your followers,’ Cathy Newman told Jordan Peterson on Channel 4 News in January. After the interview, Newman received such torrents of online abuse that Channel 4 had to call in security specialists. Peterson, a clinical psychologist at Toronto University, was on the show to discuss the gender pay gap and to promote his new book, Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. The gender pay gap, he insists, is not a result of discrimination: he believes that women are by their nature more inclined to take jobs which, it so happens, are less well paid. Peterson sympathised with his supporters’ contempt for Newman’s style of questioning, but distanced himself from the abuse. ‘If you're threatening her, stop,’ he told his 300,000 Twitter followers (now more than half a million). But ‘the dark part of me thought,’ he said later, that ‘if I wanted to sick my internet trolls on Channel 4, then there would be nothing but broken windows and riots. And then there's a little part of me that thinks – wouldn't that be fun?’