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 that 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 was 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 toward 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 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 toward ESPN for its partisan politics, support of Colin Kaepernick, and nauseating coverage of Bruce "Caitlyn" Jenner receiving the Arthur Ashe award for courage.

The disdain for ESPN kept showing up within its 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 its 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 is a domino falling within a larger inimical plot to ban all dissenting opinions.  The left's Utopia is a world where leftists 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 tweets. 

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."  The people at Twitter claim that this ability to censor comments reduces the amount of "toxicity on their platform," but "toxicity" does not mean Sarah Jeong's racism, professors claiming that the GOP and NRA want mass shootings, or Antifa promoting violence — things decent people might consider toxic.  In leftist Newspeak, "toxicity" means any attempt to assail the leftist 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 were ubiquitous.  Social proof can supplant supporting evidence. 

When elites are "ratioed" on Twitter for fraudulent claims, it reminds users that 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 McCloskeys the writer attempts to convey. 

Democrats do not want voters to realize that their radical opinions aren't the majority.  As they move farther left, the only way to uphold this illusion is to prevent unapproved opinions from entering the public view.

RIP, comment sections.

Bode Lang is a conservative blogger who regularly produces conservative videos on YouTube. You can find him at https://www.youtube.com/c/Bodelang.