I have been commenting on the Times website for years and the comments are closed down every time things start going in a direction they do not like. Sometimes the next day the comments will be back with all the conservative points of view carefully edited out. But usually they just delete them all and let them start up again. I think because they are too lazy to read through them individually.
From their point of view it would be agonizing torture to read the truth. Too many of them already have splody heads.
Reddit is notorious for this.
“Mods” will literally delete massive numbers of comments, and then lock them. Afterwards they ban a bunch of conservatives.
From the snarky comments that were in the article, I can fully understand why they would disable comments. Those people cannot tolerate a different point of view.