[memeCrasher]

No need to completely censor, when you can instead control the direction of the conversation.

Without comments, people go elsewhere to discuss the issue - elsewhere that you don't control. With comments, they discus it on your site, where you can completely control who can say what and how visible those comments are.

Done correctly it's a form of soft censorship by controlling of the discussion and manufacturing consensus among the "commentators".

Hard censorship has more immediate backlash than this does.