Progressives from Berkeley to Bristol would rather shut down a debate than stomach opposition views. Fascists at California and other universities have perfected the strategy of shutting down free speech. No longer willing to endure conservative opposition to its progressive social and political posts, ESPN.com has just joined the club by shutting down its comments section.
The liberal Deadspin and Awful Announcing blogs are both applauding ESPN's decision.
Awful Announcing's Jay Rigdon says the sports world is better without the comments section:
"To some people, predictably, this move is a sign of something much more sinister: censorship of a free-flowing conversation where people weren’t afraid to call out ESPN on their obviously over-the-top liberal agenda."
Rigdon's blog message included examples of people who have written comments in opposition to ESPN story points.
Posting on RedditSports, "Ivan Drago" commented, "Only a matter of time when they couldn’t properly control groupthink. Pretty much every narrative they tried to control went haywire on them." One person responded to Drago: "Site went to shit a few years ago when they stopped focusing on sports and started focusing on politics."
An Auburn fan posting on a college football board, "The Rig" expressed more of the same: "They realized the best way to silence their critics is not to give them a voice at all." The Rig inspired 61 up votes in agreement.
Rigdon will not miss the reader comments, writing, "While these commenters will no longer have the ability to directly reply to posts in comments that no one but the commenters ever really read, it is certainly the end of an era. The ESPN comments brought us so much, uh, well, nothing really, over the years. ... It is fun that ESPN chose a holiday week to pull the plug with very little fanfare, though. RIP, comments."
Samer Kalaf, of Deadspin, said ESPN is now unfairly "silencing thousands of morons":
"No longer will you be able to read an ESPN.com article and then underneath receive the dumbest possible reactions to it. The Worldwide Leader has phased out its Facebook-hybrid comment sections, as confirmed by a company spokesperson this week. None of the keyboard mashing will be archived—they will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
"This is an abomination. Chintzy Instagram memes are no substitute for jokes that were plagiarized from somewhere else, or completely indecipherable opinions on Colin Kaepernick."
Kalaf said the only good thing those commenters ever did was "Saying Tim Tebow sucked by comparing him to literally everything else.
Rigdon claims the decision to do away with comments makes sense. ESPN will save the money previously paid for its Facebook-based comments system. Now it's clearing the comments after each story and trying to guide readers from the original story to the next story appearing immediately below.
ESPN excused away the removal of reader comments by saying, “Fans currently have more touchpoints than ever to voice their comments. We value their opinions, and feel that we are better able to serve them through our customer care team and our social platforms. In fact, we have and are continuing to create content for social that embraces these conversations and interacts with fans.”
