Open Measures Sources: What is Disqus?

What is Disqus?

Disqus, launched in 2007, is the internet’s largest third-party commenting and discussion platform, providing online publishers with simple tools for facilitating and managing audience engagement on their websites. According to Disqus’ company’s website, hundreds of thousands of websites use the platform and its users share tens of millions of posts each month.

The platform’s design enables online publishers to host comment sections on their sites without having to develop proprietary web infrastructure and data management systems to do so. Disqus also networks all publishers using its platform together, enabling users to create and use a single account to engage with content on many publishers.

Throughout its lifespan, Disqus has faced criticism for tracking its users and mishandling their data. Journalists and researchers have also noted that Disqus has struggled to enforce its rules regarding toxic content – particularly hate speech – and have suggested that hyperpartisan right-wing publishers that elicit high volumes of such material wield outsized influence over the platform.

Open Measures’ Disqus Coverage

Open Measures added Disqus comments to our collections in February. Due to the platform’s infrastructure, we are able to collect comments shared across all Disqus-enabled websites, enabling our users to monitor and analyze activity across thousands of communities in a single spot.

Our Disqus collection contains approximately 270 million searchable comments at the time of writing, it remains a lesser-understood dataset with unique advantages and use cases for threat intelligence, brand monitoring, and trust and safety teams.

Caption: A Timeline chart displaying the results of a wildcard search of Disqus in Open Measures’ platform since February 2026, showing an estimated 270 million collected Disqus comments.

Unique Features and Use Cases

Disqus serves as web infrastructure for many online publishers in alt-media, and platform users use the same account to comment on any Disqus-enabled publisher. In Open Measures’ platform, this makes it possible to trace a user’s activity and comment history across many different publishers, which is useful for a variety of different use cases:

Trust and Safety

• Identifying coordinated campaigns: Using the content of one identified spam post as a query, return all other accounts that posted it and on which publishers – or search for commonly shared URLs to trace spam campaigns executed in comment sections.

Threat Intelligence

• Account Clustering: Identify clusters of accounts created at the same time to expose coordinated activity.

• Identify Emerging Narratives: Analyze comment sections with infrequent moderation to identify emerging narratives before they cross into the mainstream.

Brand and Trend Monitoring

• Sentiment Analysis: Analyze specific audience reactions to any number of news topics across publishers; analyze upvotes or downvotes for additional texture.

• Visualize Narrative Spread: Use time-stamps and user-specific metadata to determine when, where, and how narratives spread across publishers.

Crafting Disqus Search Queries

As with our other sources, Disqus data is searchable in Activity, Discover, and Timeline. For those using our Pro API or Advanced Search, we’ve included a list of key terms for Disqus data below for ease of reference.

For additional terms and details on query syntax, see the Standard Schema and Endpoints pages in our full documentation (please note that in Disqus queries, “forums” correspond to websites, “threads” correspond to articles, and “posts” correspond to comments).

Our Take

Comment sections on news sites have historically been an under-observed OSINT surface, as each site typically needed to be monitored individually. Open Measures’ Disqus coverage exposes much more of this hidden surface, making it searchable alongside nearly 30 other alternative platform sources.

Heading into the midterms, election officials have reported facing increasing threats with fewer federal resources to defend against them than in recent years. Open Measures will continue to support threat intelligence teams defending our elections, providing access to early threat indicators from the fringes before they materialize.

To better understand how your team might use Disqus data in your work, feel free to book a demo or subscribe to our newsletter for investigations conducted with Disqus data.