Abstract: A content management system including a document management system provides documents that include comments entered by users. Comments are organized into threads; each thread is associated with a span of text in the document. When a user requests access to a document, the document management system determines which threads are visible to the user based on an audience associated with each thread. The audience comprises the user identifiers of i) the author of the document containing the thread; ii) the authors of comments included in the thread; iii) the authors of any text included in the text span for the thread; iv) any user mentioned in the text span the thread via a user primitive; v) any user mentioned in a comment via user primitive.