Huffpost Comment System: Entire Huffington Post Website Shifts to Allow Only Facebook Comments

Huffpost Comment System: Entire Huffington Post Website Shifts to Allow Only Facebook Comments
Zachary Stieber
6/2/2014
Updated:
7/18/2015

Huffington Post has moved its entire comment system to allow only comments made by people with verified Facebook accounts.

“As many of you have noticed, we’ve been experimenting with the Facebook comments platform on many of our verticals over the past few weeks. On Monday, our entire U.S. site, including our mobile web and our mobile apps, will move exclusively to Facebook comments, allowing our readers to engage with content on the site and connect with other users outside of the native Huffington Post platform,” said HuffPost CTO Otto Toth in a blog post over the weekend.

“This is far from an an end to conversation; it’s the start of conversation where you want to have it -- and where you’ve been having it already. It’s bringing the discussions and debates to the places where you engage with them the most and introducing so much of what makes the HuffPost community great to the broader Facebook audience.”

As the changes have been made over the last six months or so, many longtime HuffPost users decided to leave the website.

The entire shift to Facebook-only comments left many of these users frustrated after they were promised that they would be exempt--only to find themselves locked out of their accounts and needing to get a verified Facebook account if they wanted to continue.

“The thing that really frosted me, and caused me to terminate my account was that they caught us by surprise,” commented one former user, “ChrisDC,” on an Epoch Times story at the time.

“There was no way to comment on what they did without caving in to the garbage about linking to my Facebook page. So, they shut us up over there quite handily, didn’t they? I don’t like being tricked,” he wrote in another comment.

Managers at the company have in the past declined to elaborate on why Facebook is the only social network being considered for the comment system, and Toth didn’t explore the decision in his post.

“We hope that you are as excited as we are for these changes to the commenting platform and to the new era of conversation on The Huffington Post!” he said.