Popular Science website shuts down comments

A SCIENCE news website has told its internet commenters that they are no longer welcome on the site.

Comment trolls are ruining science and one publication won’t stand for it anymore.

Popular Science published an editorial yesterday explaining that it didn’t take the decision to shut down its comments lightly.



“As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter,” wrote Suzanne LaBarre, the only content director of Popular Science.

Comment trolls have already been scientifically proven to be ruining science.

A recent study by the University of Wisconsin had more than 1000 participants read a fake blog post and the comments underneath it. They were then asked to answer survey questions about how they felt on the subject. The researchers found that “uncivil comments not only polarised readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself”.

Another study found that even just “firmly worded (but not uncivil) disagreements between commenters impacted readers’ perceptions of science”.

Popular Science says that there has been a politically motivated decade long war on science ranging from topics of climate change to evolution.

“Comments can be bad for science,” LaBarre wrote.

“Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.”

The site will still keep its Twitter, Facebook, Google + and Pinterest accounts.

While some select stories will still be open for comments but only ones that “lend themselves to vigorous and intellectual discussion”.

“Don’t do it for us,” LaBarre wrote. “Do it for science”.

Source: HeraldSun

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