Mapping the Most and Least Troll-Ridden Places in the U.S.

Internet Rule #1: Never read the comments. People are not always their best selves there. To find out exactly how bad the bad behavior is, we partnered with Disqus, an online commenting platform (disclosure: WIRED.com uses it) to quantify the problem. Cofounder Daniel Ha says toxic posts have been an issue from day one, and he sees it as a human problem, not a technological one: “It’s never really going to go away.” 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 software. (So sites like Infowars and the Wirecutter are included, but Facebook and Twitter are not.) The numbers reveal everything from the trolliest time of day to the nastiest state in the union. —Lo Bénichou

Points of Interest

Bellflower, CA

Bellflower wins the distinction of being the most unlike its neighbors; while it isn’t the most toxic city in the US, it is 335 percent more toxic than the rest of California.

Beverly, NJ

This South Jersey burg (pop. 2,513) has the chattiest commenters in the US: 114 authors are responsible for 150,151 comments. That averages out to 1,317 comments each!

Sharpsburg, GA

The least toxic city in the US. Sadly, it’s not because scenes from The Walking Dead were shot here and zombies have eaten all the trolls. It’s just a small town, and the smaller the group, the more influence a few bad apples (or bright pennies) will have.

Park Forest, IL

The most toxic city in the US, where 34 percent of comments are hostile. But 99 percent of those come from just two authors.

Vermont

The proportion of crummy comments is higher here than in any other state.

New Hampshire

Right next door, though, the home of “Live Free or Die” takes the prize for being the least toxic state in the US.

How Disqus Rates Comments

To broadly determine what is and isn’t toxic, Disqus uses 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. The model defines a toxic comment as “a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make you leave a discussion.” Feeding comments to the API will deliver a score from 0 to 1. In this analysis, if the comment has a score of 0.9 or above, it’s considered toxic. Context is key. As Ha points out, “There’s going to be variances to what people deem as inappropriate based on the topic they’re discussing.” But nastygrammers beware! Tools like “shadow banning” allow moderators to block users without their knowledge. And if you can’t see the trolls, you can’t feed the trolls.

Prime Troll Time

The most toxic time of day (darkest line) is 3 am—11 percent of comments are mean. The most talkative time is 9 pm (longest line), with 10,971 comments on average.

This article appears in the September issue. Subscribe now.

lettering by braulio amado.