Article by Bode Lang in "The American Thinker"
After decades of monopolizing nearly every form of mass communication, the left found its information
cartel under siege with the new freedoms enabled by social media.
Conservative voices previously blacklisted from the mainstream could
now reach large audiences and quickly became a severe threat to the
narrative.
It
wouldn't take long before the left called for censoring or banning
anyone to the right of Communism under the guise of protecting us from
"hate speech" and "misinformation." Now, the left's Orwellian censorship crusade has set its sights on the next frontier: ban all comments.
Recently, Yahoo replaced its comment section with the following disclaimer:
"Our goal is to create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and passions. In order to improve our community experience, we are temporarily suspending article commenting…”
This
new policy is hardly surprising. Yahoo is well-known for publishing
headlines which do not accurately represent the story. Beneath the
misleading title, the article is often a sloppy summary of the event,
written by an overeducated, twenty-something, who took a break from
writing about Kim Kardashian's lip care routine to inform us on
political matters.
After
suffering through the unpalatable article, the payoff often had been
within the comment section, which can sometimes serve as a refuge where
truth prevails in the form of thousands of comments eviscerating the
fake news above.
During the California wildfires and power outages of 2019, Yahoo published a story from Quartz titled: "California's Massive Power Outages Show Climate Change is Coming for Everyone, Even the Rich."
The article shifted blame away from bad environmental policies by
California Democrats towards the Climate Change monster. Some of the
most liked comments were:
"This has nothing to do with climate change. Nice try though!""California's problems with electrical transmission due to restrictive environmental laws regarding tree clearing and lumber industry. Decades of fuel buildup becomes a disaster zone.""Kansas has wind & droughts, oddly no fire issues. Guess clearing dry brush isn’t a liberal choice""I'm 53 years old. I don't have the best memory, but I do think I remember wind and warm weather in the summer while growing up in northern California. I could be wrong though. Maybe they didn't have weather back then."
This humiliating saga for Yahoo went on for years. Finally, they've had enough.
What's
the point of publishing propaganda if all anyone can scroll to the
comment section and find the author's misleading representation of the
story, or deliberate omission of facts, exposed?
This mission to ban comments is not new, but Yahoo joining the boycott is revealing.
A
few years ago, major publishers like ESPN didn’t appreciate what they
found in their comment section. For ESPN and many other major websites,
the problem was anonymity.
The
solution was requiring a Facebook login to comment on articles. This
way, people will think twice about posting "hate speech" in comment
sections if they are no longer anonymous. To ESPN's surprise, attaching
identities before commenting did not stop the barrage of ridicule
towards ESPN for their partisan politics, support of Colin Kaepernick, or nauseating coverage of Caitlyn Jenner receiving the Arthur Ashe award for courage.
The
disdain for ESPN kept showing up within their comment sections,
triggering ESPN to delete them altogether. Many other websites
followed.
Fake
news is all in vain if John and Jane Doe from Milwaukee can quickly
dismantle their work in a few sentences. Now, comment sections are
becoming endangered species.
Do not dismiss the abolition of comment sections as trivial or unimportant.
The
extinction of comment sections on websites like Yahoo and ESPN are
merely dominos falling within a larger inimical plot to ban all
dissenting opinions. The Left’s Utopia is a world where they can lie as
much as they want, and nobody can contest their claims.
Twitter
might be considered the most extensive comment section in the world,
and like Yahoo, the media work hard to craft propaganda ripe to publish
on it. The last thing they want is to have their lies exposed within
the replies of their tweet.
Media
Elitists began pressuring Twitter to alleviate this predicament under
the same phony pretense of stopping hate speech, abuse, and
misinformation.
Twitter soon developed new features allowing users to hide specific
replies to their tweets to combat "abusive comments." Twitter claims
this ability to censor comments reduces the amount of "toxicity on their
platform," but "toxicity" does not mean Sarah Jeong's racism, professors claiming the GOP and NRA want mass shootings, or Antifa
promoting violence – things decent people might consider toxic. In
Leftists newspeak, "toxicity" means any attempt to assail their
narrative.
The
media attribute the motive for Twitter's changes as an appropriate
response to "pressure" to clean up its platform, but as Daniel
Greenfield writes, "The pressure in question comes from the media. And its idea of cleaning up is censoring conservatives."
Twitter is also testing a new technology, "sending
users a prompt when they reply to a tweet using offensive or hurtful
language, in an effort to clean up conversations on the social media
platform."
For the creators of fake news, the ideal solution is training people to self-censor.
How quickly terms like "pro-life" and "MAGA" find their way on the naughty list of hurtful and offensive language is unclear.
The purpose of eliminating comment sections on websites and replies on Twitter is to regain their monopoly of information.
A
powerful weapon in the left's repertoire of indoctrination tools is
presenting their opinions and beliefs as if they are ubiquitous. Social
proof can supplant supporting evidence.
When Elites are "ratioed" on Twitter for fraudulent claims, it reminds users an opposition does exist. When articles smearing
the McCloskeys for defending their home against violent mobs contain
thousands of comments expressing support for the St. Louis couple, it
undermines the illusion of unanimous agreement about the evil of the
McCloskey's the writer attempts to convey.
Democrats
do not want voters to realize their radical opinions aren’t the
majority. As they move further Left, the only way to uphold this
illusion is to prevent unapproved opinions from public view.
R.I.P. comment sections.
