Why PopSci Is Shutting Off Their Comments ⇥ popsci.com

Suzanne LaBarre, Popular Science:

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’s certainly room to debate areas of even the most solid of sciences, but these debates must be participated in by only those qualified. Anything else is just noise. This is a great move by one of the world’s most-read science topical publications.