America’s Worst Trolls Live in Vermont, Suburban Illinois and the South of the Country
Those of us who write online tend to have a very specific understanding of what a standard Internet troll looks like. Their typical dwelling is a wood-paneled basement, usually in their parents’ home. Their uniforms are made of unwashed terry cloth, and their skin is the translucent white of a prehistoric deep-sea fish. Less often, however, it is considered where they actually are in the country.
Thanks to Wired , we now have some information on where the troll populations are most dense in the US. The magazine partnered with commenting platform Disqus to analyze 92 million comments over 16 months using an API programmed to identify and evaluate annoying comments. In this case, a toxic comment is defined as any comment that is rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable enough to induce other users to leave the discussion. When the API loads comments, it scores between 0 and 1 – anything above 0.9 or above is considered toxic.
Application of the API to over 2 million authors across over 7000 editorial platforms has produced interesting results. For example, there is a disproportionate number of hostile trolls in the south of the country, but there is no state as bad as Vermont, which has the most bad comments – 12.2%. (You can click Wired to view the data as a map.)
And what the hell is going on in Bellflower, California? Located in Los Angeles County just north of Long Beach, the city isn’t the worst when it comes to terrible online commentators, but it is really quite different from those around it – with a bad comment rate of 32.7, according to Wired. , 335 percent more toxic than its neighbors. According to the census , Bellflower’s racial makeup roughly matches the areas that surround it, with whites and Hispanics making up the bulk of its inhabitants. The city’s two largest employers are the Bellflower Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente, which conjure up unsettling images of nurses and doctors shouting hateful comments as their patients wither and die in waiting rooms. (But not before writing some hateful comments of your own?)
But the most toxic city in the United States is Forest Park, Illinois. Park Forest is a middle-class suburb south of Chicago, and while it has a 34 percent toxicity rating for comments, 99 percent of comments come from just two authors. Do they know each other? They are married? Do they write terrible comments to each other ?
Finally, the data shows that the most toxic time of day for internet trolls – the hour when the darkest and darkest comments are made – is 3 a.m. No wonder.