Notice my skillful use of the “Reply as Linked Topic” feature as I head down this enticing little rabbit-trail? Everyone should try it, it’s fun and easy!
I don’t know what “creationist” forums there are. I know AIG does’t allow any comments period on its blog posts. There is a Facebook page full of affirming comments which makes me think that either there is an approval process or critical comments are deleted.
I have never had a comment deleted from any of the YEC Patheos bloggers who frequently talk about origins. I think there it’s almost welcome to have some opposition, because then the other commenters have someone to wring their hands over, call nasty names, and fling all their 2 Peter 2 prooftexts about false teachers in the last days at.
You should design a little experiment and we could all participate in the research and find out what is allowed where.
I have tried commenting on AIG facebook, none ever get through. They are heavily censored.
Patheos is different as it is moderated and your comments have to be new, high quality and well written and to the point.
It must depend on who runs the blog. Patheos is just the host. Some bloggers approve comments before posting, some moderate them, and some allow a free-for-all.
On Reddit, r/creation is private, meaning you have to be approved by the mods before they let you in. They didn’t let me in. Apparently, it used to be public, but they had too many trolls.
Just as a side note, when I wrote for the Daily Beast after the Ham/Nye debate in 2014, The comments were downright vicious—mostly from atheists. Absolutely spitting with hatred and scorn. And that’s par for the course for a comment section on a major media article about creationism, in my experience.
In my experience, if it is one of the young earth creationist ministry Facebook pages (e.g., AIG or one of the prominent staff members), even a relatively neutral question will be deleted within an average of 20 minutes if the question (1) may expose readers to a problem with some aspect of the young earth viewpoint, or (2) it may possibly encourage readers to investigate a different viewpoint, or (3) it fails to harmonize with an enthusiastic affirmation and congratulations exchange thread already underway. (That is, if everybody is fawning over something the ministry leader said in the OP and telling how he/she holds the only acceptable opinion of the “genuine Christian”, anything else of even a neutral nature is considered unacceptable.)
The most sure way to get one’s comment deleted is to include a URL link to anything educational about science that is not basically “approved” by the community. That can be true even if the OP is about some article elsewhere on the Internet and I want to include the link which they deliberately omitted.
I once experimented with posting a prior claim of the ministry leader from elsewhere on the ministry website and saying, “I don’t understand how the statement above can harmonize with what he/she said in the article at this link. Could you please clarify?” About half the time, I was told something like “If one holds to an inerrant view of scripture, there is no contradiction at all” (which made no sense to me)…and the other half of the time my comment disappeared without explanation.
As to general purpose, independent Facebook forums on various topics, it seems to depend entirely on the agenda of the admins—some are open to all views and some strictly censor.
I’ve never been censored/deleted at an “atheist” Facebook forum.
I was always planning to design a more rigorous set of experiments using grad students but never got around to it.
