This California city has a massive troll problem
Something is up in Bellflower, California - citizens there seem to have a lot of bile to spew.
Nearly a third of all the online comments made by people living in the Southern California city over the last 16 months were hostile or toxic, according to a new report by Wired that was based on data from Disqus. That proportion of hostile comments was 335% higher than proportion for the rest of the state, according to the report.
The magazine and Disqus, a company that offers online discussion services for web sites, analyzed 92 million comments from internet users nationwide that were left over a 16-month period. The magazine and Disqus defined toxic comments as ones that are "rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable" and that would be likely to make someone "leave a discussion."
Some 32.7% of the comments coming from Bellflower qualified as toxic. By comparison, only 8.1% of the comments emanating from neighboring Los Angeles were considered as toxic.
So what's Bellflower's problem? On the surface, it doesn't seem to be a bad place. But who knows what angers the trolls.
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