Wapo ends comments sections

Not that I saw. I messaged their customer service and am awaiting a reply. I never noticed any vile speech--of course I always selected "reader's picks" and so never read the low-voted vile stuff, if there was any.

Yahoo was great originally when the message feed just scrolled and there were no popularity ratings or censorship of unpopular opinions. That's how much of the word about the sketchy happenings around 9/11 got out. That's precisely why the right censored it and turned it into a Reddit like popularity contest. When freespeech is truly free the right can't game it but when they have thumbs up and thumbs down ratings hiding people's comments and only putting the popular comments at the top the freespeech dies in the dark.

Wikipedia says this about the Daily Mail:
The Daily Mail has been noted for its unreliability and widely criticised for its printing of sensationalist and inaccurate scare stories of science and medical research,[16][17][18][19] and for instances of plagiarism and copyright infringement.[20][21][22][23]

There is nothing about it being the most widely read online newspaper in the world, and I doubt that it is.
A survey in 2014 found the average age of its readers was 58, and it had the lowest demographic for 15- to 44-year-olds among the major British dailies.[11] Uniquely for a British daily newspaper, it has a majority female readership, with women making up 52–55% of its readers.[12] It had an average daily circulation of 1,134,184 copies in February 2020.[13] Between April 2019 and March 2020 it had an average daily readership of approximately 2.180 million, of whom approximately 1.407 million were in the ABC1 demographic and .773 million in the C2DE demographic.[14] Its website has more than 218 million unique visitors per month.[15]

Additionally it has been sued successfully a number of times. One of them was by Melania Trump:
2017, April: First Lady of the United States, Melania Trump, received an undisclosed settlement over claims in the Mail that she had worked as an escort in the 1990s.[173] In September 2016, she began litigation against the Daily Mail for an article which discussed escort allegations. The article included rebuttals and said that there was no evidence to support the allegations. The Mail regretted any misinterpretation that could have come from reading the article, and retracted it from its website.[174] Melania Trump filed a lawsuit in Maryland, suing for $150 million.[175] On 7 February 2017, the lawsuit was re-filed in the correct jurisdiction, New York, where the Daily Mail's parent company has offices, seeking damages of at least $150 million.[176]

I believe it relates to section 230 protection for online providers. People are suing online platforms for offensive comments made by users. Both Trump and Biden wanted to remove section 230 protection. Both Daily Mail and Mother Jones have active comments sections but my user id was banned from Mother Jones for my comments about Laquan McDonald, the kid with the knife who was shot sixteen times. I used to post all the time on CNN/NPR/IMDB before they removed their comments sections.