Interestingly, I’ve recently been wondering about reducing the scope of this project to making Discourse a viable commenting system for WordPress based news sites. With that approach, most of the technical objections that have been raised in this topic could be easily addresses - including adding the functionality to allow users to comment directly on the main article. The existing WordPress plugin could serve as a starting point for the project. Within the next few days I’ll update this topic with more details about how it could be implemented.
Do you have any idea if the legal concerns would be less if user generated content that contained potential misinformation was allowed to exist and be discussed in a private Discourse topic, but was not displayed in the public facing article’s comment section?