Starting today, PopularScience.com will no longer accept comments on new articles. Here's why.
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It wasn't a decision we made 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.
That is not to suggest that we are the only website in the world that attracts vexing commenters. Far from it. Nor is it to suggest that all, or even close to all, of our commenters are shrill, boorish specimens of the lower internet phyla. We have many delightful, thought-provoking commenters.
But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benefits or supportive?). Then, through a randomly assigned condition, they read either epithet- and insult-laden comments ("If you don't see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you're an idiot" ) or civil comments. The results, as Brossard and coauthor Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a New York Times op-ed:
Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant's interpretation of the news story itself.
In the civil group, those who
initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified
with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after
reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up
with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with
the technology.
Simply including an ad hominem
attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think
the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd
previously thought.
If you carry out those results to their logical end--commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded--you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the "off" switch.
Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story.
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus
on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from
evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs
again. 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.There are plenty of other ways to talk back to us, and to each other: through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, livechats, email, and more. We also plan to open the comments section on select articles that lend themselves to vigorous and intelligent discussion. We hope you'll chime in with your brightest thoughts. Don't do it for us. Do it for science.
Suzanne LaBarre is the online content director of Popular Science. Email suzanne.labarre at popsci dot com.