Saturday, May 06, 2017

Disqus, Why’d You Do Me Wrong? Web Company Transforms Itself from Communications Giant into Authoritarian Censorship Hub

By Nicholas Stix

I saw what appeared to be a Disqus notification this afternoon, only to learn that the company had disappeared something like seven years and thousands of my comments.

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“Joined May 6, 2017”

When I tried to reach Disqus’ administration (via Google), I got this page:

“Nice! Your account has been created.

“What would you like to do with Disqus?

Options:

“I want to comment on sites”

“I want to install Disqus on my site”

I want to comment on sites


I want to install Disqus on my site


https://disqus.com/profile/signup/intent/

I googled disqus + censorship, and learned that the company has declared war on anyone whose politics it hates, including Occidental Dissent and Breitbart.

It’s as if Hillary won.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I started, well attempting to, comment on websites I like, most of which use disqus several months ago.

What I have found is that disqus will auto flag any and all of my comments as spam such that they either never get posted, or are only posted briefly before being removed.

Now I am fully aware of what spam is, having used the internet and email for decades, and I can guarantee I am not a spammer. My attempts to comment on articles I find interesting is in good faith, and sometimes I would even spend 20+ minutes writing detailed and thoughtful comments on the topic being discussed.

But it doesn't seem to matter, and what is really disconcerting to me is that my comments are not substantially different than other peoples comments who I see are allowed to be posted.

Having searched thru disqus help info, It really is not clear to me why disqus marks everything I write as spam, yet allows other people, some of which are obviously spammers to be posted.

Thus far, of a dozen different websites Ive tried posting on, 100% of them censor my posts 100% of the time. The only exception being one of the websites in which responded to my contact attempt in which I asked them why. They replied that there was no reason why! Then they said they marked my comments/account to be 'allowed' to post. Subsequently my comments were then allowed to be posted on that specific site. This however did not affect any other site, and even several times since my account related to that specific site has 'reverted' back to the censored state, forcing me to again contact them in which they again undo whatever is forcing my comments to be marked as spam regardless of their content...

Put simply I am but attempting to be a casual commenter, yet have found disqus to be censoring me 100% with the only way I can get anything posted is by explicitly contacting the site moderator and asking them to allow it. But doing this for each and every website I want to comment on is not merely impractical but does not work, as other sites simply ignore my contact attempt.

This results in the impression that disqus is not actually a commenting platform, but rather it is a censorship platform. It has all the appearances and features of a commenting platform, but in practice it appears to despise commenting as its actual primary function is the redirecting of peoples comments into a virtual twilight zone in which the only person who can see their comment is the person that wrote it, with the added bonus of this label atop it:

" Detected as spam Thanks, we'll work on getting this corrected. "

Thanks? Are they thanking me? I wrote a comment, they mark it as spam, and they thank me? What exactly are they getting corrected? My 'wrong' thoughts?

The disqus system is 100% opaque from the end of the commenter, there was no input from my end in terms of classification of the comment as spam, yet they label it a such a way that implies that I have a say in the matter. As far as I can tell there is no actual recourse either.

Bottom line result is extreme discouragement from attempting to post comments at all for all sites that use disqus. It really makes me question how many other people are experiencing the same thing and are simply having their voices silenced, and are not otherwise talking about what is happening.