Disqus and social sign-on comments are cancer. They must be plugged. Too much Ivan all over social media these days. Zuckerberg is equally disturbing a threat and should not be trusted with his bizarre utopian language.
Disqus and social sign-on are the great cancer. Every local news site on the planet that outsources authentication to whoever's got a valid Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc., is opening themselves to troll farms landsliding both opinions and values out of existence in favor of mindless repeatable bites, "the Sleeper Effect." This is twice as true of Twitter discussions.
Hostile nations are employing legions of both paid users with a posting quota and bots. They are taking advantage of globalism to spread fear and infest rivals with a self-destructive nationalistic ideology which appears to be grassroots and organic.
Just the other day I saw "easyvpn" on here, a one command shell utility to hop VPNs to exit from any desired country. I assume far more anonymous and powerful alternatives exist if you have the cash. This kind of thing paired with "persona management software" is a real problem.
Step back, stop out-sourcing authentication on your websites (even if it means you have to do the time learning some amount of practical cryptography, it's safer than handing the keys off in this climate), and stop conceding massive tracts of digital "space" to a hundred thousand Ru & Romanian twitter accounts claiming to be Joe America tired of liberals while deflecting to "Correct the Record" and "but emails" every time you call them out. Step it up with security, boys, that means some degree of human intelligence. The Internet is growing up and it's going through a pretty nasty phase right now.
Build a wall? How about build a wall around your website so Facebook social sign-on isn't letting Ivan roleplay half of Texas on a popular news story.
I don't think social sign-on is that big of a problem. It certainly makes it easier to comment on news stories, but if you're spending the effort to create thousands of social profiles already, what's a few more e-mail registrations using your Facebook email address?
You could restrict comments to subscribers, but that's anti-social to a degree that I expect is too severe for marketers.
