How comment hosting service Disqus, which gets ~2B unique visitors/month and supports anonymous comments, is losing its battle against trolls and hate speech
The commenting giant Disqus has said repeatedly that it doesn't allow hate speech. But its platform is overrun with trolls, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis. Tweets: @travelinganna , @slpng_giants , @cwarzel , @cwarzel , and @mmasnick See also Mediagazer Tweets: Annemarie Dooling / @travelinganna : Not gonna lie: when I worked at sites that used Disqus I was thrilled at all the information I could find about how you comment across other sites that use it too http://www.buzzfeed.com/... Sleeping Giants / @slpng_giants : .@mpattyfly, as Head of New Business at @disqus, how can you talk to your potential customers about your platform when it allows Nazis to overrun it with violent white power comments without fear of removal? http://www.buzzfeed.com/... Charlie Warzel / @cwarzel : I wrote about how alt right trolls are using Disqus to conduct troll “raids” in the comments sections of major news sites. They're also using Disqus to create their own ‘channels’ where they organize and recruit new people http://www.buzzfeed.com/... http://twitter.com/... Charlie Warzel / @cwarzel : New from me: a look into how the alt right, white nationalists, and neo Nazis are manipulating the online comments platform Disqus to troll, organize, and recruit new users (and hijcacking pubs like Breitbart) http://www.buzzfeed.com/... Mike Masnick / @mmasnick : This is an interesting article, but the fact that it confuses DMCA 512 with CDA 230 bothers me. Also, seeing people say this is a reason to ditch comments, but that's bullshit. Sites just need to give a shit about their own comments. http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Disqus sits underneath thousands of publisher sites as invisible infrastructure — roughly 2B unique visitors a month — and, as former site editor Annemarie Dooling notes, it exposes how users comment across every site running it. BuzzFeed's reporting shows the gap between Disqus's stated policy that it doesn't allow hate speech and a platform where trolls, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis organize raids and recruit.
The story lands amid a broader enforcement problem: an earlier purge of alt-right accounts left pro-Nazi speech still flowing on Discord, Twitter was only beginning to study how white nationalists use its platform, and dedicated alt-right networks were struggling to hold talent, users, and funding — pushing activity back onto mainstream infrastructure like Disqus. Activist group Sleeping Giants is already pressing Disqus directly over violent white-power comments left up without removal.
First-order effects
- Publishers running Disqus widgets now carry the brand risk of extremist comments appearing under their own content, while Sleeping Giants' public campaign puts Disqus's head of New Business on the hook for accounts tied to advertising revenue.
- Disqus faces a direct contradiction between its public no-hate-speech policy and documented coordinated troll raids and recruiting channels operating on its network.
Second-order effects
- Advertiser-activist pressure of the Sleeping Giants kind gives publishers a reason to weigh native or alternative commenting systems, threatening the distribution reach that makes Disqus valuable to its ad business.
- Because Disqus spans many sites at once, moderation decisions ripple beyond any single publisher — the same dynamic that kept extremist speech alive on Discord after account purges, since enforcement at one layer leaves the underlying communities intact elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, moderation scrutiny migrates from consumer-facing social networks like Twitter to the B2B infrastructure layers — commenting, hosting, distribution — where hate speech is less visible but equally persistent, as Google Podcasts' hands-off approach also illustrates.
- Platforms whose openness exists nominally but not in usable form for ordinary users will increasingly face a choice between investing in real enforcement or ceding the infrastructure role to competitors who can.
The trend: Content-moderation accountability is expanding from consumer social networks to the invisible infrastructure layers — commenting systems, podcast hosts, chat platforms — where extremist communities persist after headline purges.