Due to concerns that rowdy comments are skewing readers’ perceptions of science reporting, Popular Science has shut down its comment section. Derek Thompson approves the move:
Like a narrow Supreme Court opinion, PopSci‘s defense was case-specific, without presuming to tell other sites they should follow along. Comments “erode the popular consensus” on scientifically validated topics, LaBarre wrote, such as climate change and evolution. It’s perfectly legal to wonder aloud on your Facebook page whether dinosaur bones are real or placed there by a spiritual entity to test our faith. But it’s not quite the discussion a site like PopSci wants to cultivate under a column by a world-renowned paleontologist. “The cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories within a website devoted to championing science,” LaBarre wrote eloquently.
Will Oremus objects:
[T]he magazine seems a bit too ready to enshrine scientific findings as gospel rather than thinking critically about their implications.
In one of the two studies, subjects exposed to a comments section studded with ad hominem attacks came away with “a more polarized understanding” of nanotechnology than those who read polite comments. But does that prove that readers would be better off with no comments section at all? I don’t see how it could, given that the researchers didn’t even address that question.
I happen to know that only because I clicked through to the New York Times op-ed cited by Popular Science, which in turn linked to the study in question. Incredibly, Popular Science itself didn’t see fit to link directly to either of the studies it cited as justification for its anti-comments stance. And for the second of the two studies, it provided no link at all, nor did it mention the title, the authors, or the name of the publication—no way, in short, for readers to examine the source material and draw their own conclusions. I guess Popular Science doesn’t trust its readers with original sources, either.
The reasoning behind the Dish’s own lack of a comments section is here.
The Dish 