Reader Comments Must Terrify the Powers that Be

IMO reach-suppression operations would also target comments from the Man and Woman on the Street opining away on their devices trying to save the world.

The rationale for censoring Reader Comments is that many comments include dangerous mis- and disinformation. As this graphic shows, the U.N.’s “Risk Report” found that 80 percent of “experts” agree.

Author’s note: It will be interesting to observe how many Reader Comments today’s article on the “importance of Reader Comments” generates.

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IMO, censorship and “reach-suppression” ops are one of the “keys to the operation” for the world’s real rulers.

Furthermore, I think an important part of this coordinated conspiracy is an effort to thwart the potential influence of citizens who use Reader Comments to present information or express “unauthorized” or “dangerous” opinions.

As I’ve written ad nauseam, all important “truth-seeking” organizations are completely captured. Most important among these alleged truth-seekers would be the corporate press, also referred to as the mainstream media or the Fourth Estate.

The corporate “watchdog” press constructs and manipulates “narratives” via the stories its journalists write, but also, just as significantly, by the subjects their journalists will never investigate nor write about (for example, “evidence of early spread” or the embalmers’ clots).

A “hole in the dyke” of this strategy is the fact many consumers of news spend just as much time reading Reader Comments as the story proper. This means the efforts of “gatekeepers of the news” can be circumnavigated by intelligent and informed readers who either post rebuttals in the Comments or add information that the news organization’s journalists would never include in a story.

While Reader Comments sections are very popular with readers, they are also no doubt viewed by The “Powers that Be” as very dangerous or as a “threat” to any entities that want to control a given narrative.

The “solution” to blocking or reducing this threat has at least six components:

• One, news organizations simply don’t offer Reader Comments.

• Two, if a news organization did once allow Reader Comments, they did away with this option.

• Three, only paid subscribers are allowed to make Reader Comments.

• Four, news organizations employ individuals who “moderate” Reader Comments, meaning these people get to pick what comments are published and, just as importantly, the comments that won’t be published.

• A fifth possibility, which I believe might apply to my Substack, is that algorithms or AI programs are employed to limit the number of comments at some newsletters (and, somehow, decrease the number of “likes” a given post might receive or doesn’t receive.)

• A sixth strategy is to cancel or block posters who make unauthorized posts. (This happened to me when I was a paid subscriber to The Athletic sports website and my posting privileges were cancelled when I kept defending athletes who were anti-vax, like Aaron Rodgers. Dan Rather also cancelled my subscription after I made a few posts at his Substack newsletter he didn’t like).

The case study of al.com …

An excellent example that supports the above bullet points would be the evolution of Reader Comments at the website al.com, which is the largest “news organization” in my state of Alabama. (al.com is the former Birmingham News, Mobile Press-Register and Huntsville Times newspapers. The website is actually part of a very large national news parent company, Advanced Media, which operates many websites, newspapers and magazines around the country).

Once upon a time - about 15 years ago - al.com hosted an extremely popular Reader Comments section. In fact, I would say hundreds of thousands, or maybe more than a million, readers visited the site multiple times a day to, yes, read the stories, but also read the Reader Comments, which would number in the hundreds or thousands for the most popular articles.

Speaking for myself, I would routinely use this Comment Section to call BS on an article I thought was biased or not “fair and balanced.” Numerous other readers did the same thing.

Long story short, al.com - citing several reasons, some perhaps legitimate and some no doubt disingenuous - eliminated this very popular section.

Certainly, by the time Covid arrived in 2020 (actually in 2019 in my opinion), nobody could make Reader Comments that challenged any of the authorized narratives, which were all “settled science” according to the non-skeptical, “pack” journalists employed by this news company.

The same “business decision” applied to just about every prominent news organization in the world, the majority of which used all or several of the above-cited six strategies to block or control unwanted Reader Comments.

Basically, in a nutshell, contrarian or independent thinkers were SOL if they wanted to opine on any of the major and important issues of the day.

(Once upon a time, pre-Internet, these people could also write an old-fashioned Letter to the Editor, but those once-popular sections are also now Gone with the Wind.)

Two examples of the journalism gold one can find in the Readers Comments sections …

As a citizen journalist and researcher, I’ve made it a habit to read as many Reader Comments as I can.

In fact, several of my biggest “scoops” or exclusive stories were discovered by me reading Reader Comments sections.

For example, I think I found the first likely case of Covid in the UK - in November 2019 - by reading 500 comments from The Daily Mail’s website, which still allowed comments. (See story here.)

Also, back when I had disposable income, I was once a paid subscriber to The New York Times and, because of this, found a fellow subscriber who said he had Covid in the “fall of 2019.” Significantly, the man said he got two different positive antibody results from two different testing labs, which he named.

(At least four times, I sent the text of this man’s comments to the newspaper’s “news tip” email address, thinking America’s paper of record might want to follow-up on this eye-opening claim, but nobody followed up on the possible first Covid case in the world. For more on “Shane from Marin County’s” story, see “Case 3” in this Early Spread article.)

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I doubt many readers remember this, but I once wrote a 7,000-word story where I ran excepts of hundreds of Reader Comments I had saved from people who think they had “Early Covid.”

IMO, such “anecdotes” - especially if there are huge numbers of them - should carry some weight when assessing the validity or plausibility of a given hypothesis.

The same reasoning that applies to “Early Spread anecdotes” would also apply to anecdotes from people who say they were injured by Covid “vaccines” or who say a loved one or friend died after getting these shots.

A question I’ve asked: “Are every one of these people wrong?” (Of course, the answer provided by experts would be: “Yes.”)

(Per Risk Experts at the U.N., sharing articles like I publish every week is very dangerous so, for your own safety, please don’t share this article.)

Something is going on at Zero Hedge and Citizen Free Press

Recently, two significant changes have occurred at two popular Internet sites I peruse several times each day.

One site is Citizen Free Press, which aggregates news headlines and became one of the most visited websites in the world after The Drudge Report, for some mysterious reason, did an ideological 180. (Also, founder Matt Drudge seems to have fallen off the face of the earth).

For years, “Citizen Kane,” the proprietor of this site, allowed Reader Comments, but about a year ago, he did away with this popular section.

In fact, this decision dramatically curtailed the reach of my Substack newsletter as in the first 18 months of this newsletter, CFP ran dozens of my stories, which increased the “reach” of my articles by 20,000 to 74,000 readers every time I got to access Kane’s readership.

(Envious fellow writers have asked me how I got so many stories posted at CFP and my answer is, “I’m not sure.” All I did was post a brief summary of one of my articles - with a link - in his Reader Comments section. Clearly, Kane read his Reader Comments and must have liked many of my articles.)

Recently, I’ve noticed that Kane no longer posts links to many topics he once did cover, like Early Spread. (Also, raise your hand if you’ve ever seen an embalmers’ clots story at CFP). IMO, Citizen Kane has also gone full MAGA or full neo-con. Anyway, I’m not sure why he did away with his Reader Comments, but my guess is that he is also now blocking his readers from being exposed to certain contrarian or frowned-upon points of view.

I also know my writing, for some unknown reason, has been banned. (“No links for you!”)

Zero Hedge might be the best example of a very popular website that has grown in popularity and influence because the site always allowed uncensored Reader Comments to anyone, no paid subscription necessary.

Like myself, I’m sure millions of readers check out this site several times a day and go straight to the Reader Comments. (I might be one of the site’s more famous or infamous posters, but, at least for now, I’m not going to disclose my posting handle!)

Recently, the posting board at ZH is up-in-arms because the “Tylers” have obviously changed their Reader Comment policies.

More than a year ago, ZH started marketing “premium” subscriptions (which are pricey at $60/month). Since no Fortune 500 oligarch-supporting corporation will buy ads at ZH, one understands this effort to get more revenue from voluntary paid subscribers (the same revenue model as Substack).

What changed is that the people who pay $720/year now dominate the Reader Comments section. That is, the posts of premium subscribers go to the top of the thread, and often, stay there all day. While free subscribers (like myself) can still make posts, these are often quickly sent to where the lost socks go and nobody sees them or they get zero or no “likes.”

Just about everyone at ZH is speculating on what’s really going on here and why. Some people think that the “Zionist” or “Israeli lobby” might be involved somehow.

(While I’m not convinced this is the case, I do believe the conspiracy that supporters of Israel bought Tik-Tok largely to limit the negative content young people were starting to post about the “genocide” in Gaza, etc. FWIW, the “official narrative” was that Americans had to buy Tik Tok because China was somehow using the platform to brainwash the world’s younger generations, which IMO was a bogus cover story.)

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All (I think) I know about Reader Comments sections is that they are very important to the Powers that Be, who must hate and fear forums that are completely uncensored. IMO, if these sites can be manipulated or shadow censored, they will be.

I am also convinced that “bots” and perhaps AI posters have been employed to skew, manipulate or control narratives in many Reader Comments sections.

IMO, the effectiveness of this “strategy” might have been illustrated when Florida governor Ron DeSantis was running for president.

As most readers will remember, during the first years of Covid, Gov. DeSantis was considered a political hero or “rock star” among the cohort of citizens who think like I do.

Alas, this commonly-held sentiment changed in an incredibly short period of time. Personally, I think an army of bots and sophisticated algorithms were used to take down DeSantis.

I can use posts I made and viewed on Zero Hedge to support this conspiracy theory. For years, everyone on ZH loved Gov. DeSantis. Almost overnight, a flood of posts started being made saying he was a fraud and another Jeb Bush clone.

I tried to defend the governor of the “free state of Florida” with counter posts and all of my posts got dozens of down votes.

“Something is going on here,” I thought to myself.

For whatever reason(s), the “narrative” about Ron DeSantis flipped 180 degrees, leading me to believe this was NOT any “organic” movement - it must have been part of a plan.

One take-away from this theory would be that the Powers that Be can manipulate opinion or narratives by censoring the reach of certain posters, but they can also use these same comments sections to manufacture bogus new narratives with either bogus human beings and/or paid trolls.

In Conclusion …

A pet theory of mine is that as the world moves forward in time, censorship and Narrative Control operations will become more important to the Powers that Be.

As I view things, these people and organizations have no choice. If they don’t continue to do this, they risk being exposed for the villains they are … and one morning may wake up to see 2,000 people with pitch forks massing behind the walls of their gated communities.

Per my theory, the world will always be full of “threats” to the Deep Staters and Epstein Class … and these threats will always have to be neutralized..

As it turns out, the real threats aren’t “Iran” or “Russia” - they are you and me, people with firm opinions who aren’t afraid to share them.

Unlike myself, most people don’t publish their own Substack newsletter or if they do, most authors have fewer than 100 subscribers.

This leaves … the Reader Comments Sections as the place any resistance movement could, theoretically, reach large numbers of fellow citizens and maybe plot to “take our country back.”

However, per my theory, the Bad Guys figured this out and this threat has been neutralized and will continue to be neutralized.

As things turned out, a key battlefield in the war for hearts and minds was the Reader Comments Sections.

Anyway, as I’ve been writing for at least two years, post while you still can. Also, if you are being censored, this means you are doing something good and right.

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