Friday Eye Candy: Mapping the Nation's Internet Trolls

Lo Bénichou shares the results of a partnership between Wired and Disqus, the online comment platform that you will find below this article and all the others on the Planetizen website.

The two media companies set out to quantify the problem of bad behavior in the comments section—an issue since "day one" of the Internet, according to the article. To do so, Disqus "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," explains Bénichou.

Wired then took the findings and packaged them in some slick interactive maps and infographics. In the map of the nation, for instance, we see that in the state of California, where Planetizen is headquartered, 7.5 percent of the comments studied were "toxic." The city of Los Angeles, where Planetizen is located, slightly outpaces the state, with 8.1 percent of its comments being toxic—mostly on Curbed, we assume (just kidding). In nearby Bellflower (hometown of famous former Major League Baseball players Nomar Garciaparra, Jeff Kent, and Trevor Hoffman), a whopping 32.7 percent of comments are toxic. That makes Bellflower the trolliest city in the country, according to this analysis.

The article includes insight into the methodology of the Disqus study, and additional findings on the trolliest time of the day (aka, "Prime Troll Time") and the percentage of Internet commenters who have dabbled in troll behavior at least once.