I visit the bay-area-centric website SFGate on a regular basis, since I live in the SF Bay Area. It has a lot of local news in addition to national and international stories, most of which are re-published articles from the Washington Post.
In addition to reading articles, I would occasionally post a comment regarding a particular one that interested me. There was a comments section associated with each article and to post you would need to register on the website and then click the comments link for the article you wanted to comment on. There was an ability for readers to flag a particular comment that they deemed inappropriate and some amount of moderation was happening behind the scenes, though I don’t know to what extent.
As of Friday I noticed that the comments functionality on SFGate had been removed. I emailed SFGate to inquire about it and ask why the ability to read and post comments had been removed. I’ve received no response as of this writing.
In the absence of a response I’m left to wonder. My guess is that SFGate didn’t want to deal with moderating the comments in the aftermath of Amazon’s takedown of social media platform Parler, but that’s just a guess. However, there is a least one website I visit occasionally that stated explicitly that they had abandoned their comment functionality as a direct result of being threatened with a Parler-like takedown by Amazon. As they stated in their explanation, it was a binary choice: either eliminate the ability for readers to comment, or have the website taken down.
I’ll live on without the SFGate comments. Still, it feels like free speech in this country is being restricted more and more, which is a very bad trend. When publishers restrict the voice of their readers it fosters a one-way stream of communication; of speech. Elected officials who care about free speech need to hold hearings to determine whether tech companies like Amazon have monopoly power and should be broken up in the best interest of the country.
michaelkrich 