Since day one of the internet, there have been trolls, leaving comments that are spiteful, harmful, and sometimes, downright rude. So Wired and Disqus, an online commenting platform, partnered to find out how bad this behavior really is.
The company analyzed 92 million comments over a 16-month period, written by almost 2 million authors on more than 7,000 forums that use the Disqus software. They used the Perspective API — software from Alphabet’s Jigsaw division that plugs into its system. The Perspective team had real people train the API to rate comments. A toxic comment is defined as: “a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make you leave a discussion.” If the comment has a score of 0.9 or above, it was considered toxic.
Wired put together all the results.
Bellflower, Ca is more 335 percent more toxic than the rest of California, while Sharpsburg, Georgia, is the least toxic city in the U.S. But Bellflower isn’t the most toxic city in the U.S., that title belongs to Park Forest, IL, where 34 percent of comments left by trolls are hostile. Interesting fact: 99 percent of those come from just two authors.
Vermont takes the cake with the highest number of “crummy comments” than any other state, but it is neighbors with the least toxic state, New Hampshire.
Meanwhile, Beverly, NJ, has the chattiest commenters in the U.S. One hundred and fourteen authors are responsible for 150,151 comments, which averages out to 1,317 comments each.
It seems like everyone is a bit of a jerk according to the results: a quarter of all posters made at least one toxic comment.
When do comments get most toxic? When it gets dark out. The most toxic time of the day is 3 am, when 11 percent of comments are mean. However, the most talkative time of the day is 9 pm, with 10,971 comments on average.
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