I think probably the community of ordinary people are not used to be able to speak to the authorities – and science has been presented to them as an authority – and have not yet developed a culture that works to suppress trolls, spammers, hobby-horse riders, and phonies. One solution is to make them shut up again.
The conflict goes back to the early radical Protestant notion of the priesthood of all believers, the belief that every man could interpret the Scriptures for himself. When Asimov parodies this view as ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’, or when PopSci shuts off the proles’ commentary, they are simply giving the authoritarian view, which is that true knowledge proceeds from and is guided by authority, and all else should be set aside if not suppressed. In politics, that view rejects actual democracy, or at least calls for it to be denatured by representation and ‘leadership’. For the last few centuries, capitalist control of the workplace and especially the media was strongly filtered in favor of established authority. The Internet broke that filter, and we are now struggling to adapt to the new situation and its difficulties.
