[I]f you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by nasty online commenting, Vermont’s status as the No. 1 “toxic commenting” state in the union (according to a recent survey of millions of comments) might have something to do with that.
“The proportion of crummy comments is higher here [in Vermont] than in any other state,” according to Wired.com.
Wired.com partnered with Disqus, an online commenting platform, for the national survey. Thousands of websites around the country use Disqus to display reader comments. A map, based on the survey, shows what percentage of comments from each state are considered by Disqus to be in the “toxic” range.
Vermont it turns out, has the highest percentage — 12.2 percent — that have been deemed to be toxic, compared with New Hampshire, which had the lowest percentage in the U.S., at 4.7 percent.
In the region, Massachusetts has 6.8 percent, Rhode Island, 8 percent, Connecticut, 6.9 percent, Maine, 5.5 percent, and New York, 8.3 percent.
Among other notable findings, 8 percent of comments from the District of Columbia, 10.3 percent from Iowa, 9.8 percent from South Carolina, 9.6 percent from Alabama, 7.5 percent from California and 10.1 percent from Nevada were considered toxic under a comment rating system developed by Disqus.
According to the Wired.com article, 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.
Over the past two decades, news media sites have struggled to develop strategies to discourage toxic comments, which have emerged as anonymous commenting replaced traditional letters to the editor.
The New England Newspapers Inc. papers in Vermont, the Bennington Banner, Brattleboro Reformer and Manchester Journal, once used the Topix online commenting system before switching to Disqus several years ago. In 2016, the company followed a number of other news sites in deciding to end all online commenting in favor of letters to the editor or telephone calls.
Today, an auto-response message at the end of articles on the New England Newspapers Inc. news sites says: “If you’d like to leave a comment (or a tip or a question) about this story with the editors, please email us. We also welcome letters to the editor for publication; you can do that by filling out our letters form and submitting it to the newsroom.”
VTDigger.org articles end with this statement:
“VTDigger.org requires that all commenters identify themselves by their authentic first and last names. Initials, pseudonyms or screen names are not permissible.
“No personal harassment, abuse, or hate speech is permitted. Comments should be 1,000 characters or fewer. We moderate every comment. Please go to our FAQ for the full policy.”
Kevin Moran, executive editor of the NENI, which include the flagship The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, said the newspapers decided to end online commenting in September 2016.
“We’re out to raise the quality of discussion about the people, places and things covered on our website,” Moran said. “And while we like to blaze trails around here lately, we’re following a growing list of news sites to drop online commenting over concerns about tone, incivility and abuse.
“So here is the alternative (and really, it’s not an alternative, but a tested, tried-and-true institution of communication): Write us a letter.”
Greg Sukiennik, managing editor of the NENI papers in Vermont, said Thursday, “The trouble with story comments was that it was too easy for a person to say horrible things about everyday people behind a convenient cloak of anonymity, with few or no repercussions. Anyone in the news was fair game — not just reporters, sources or public figures, but everyday people who happened to find themselves in a story. It created a toxic, hateful atmosphere and detracted from, rather than added to, the noble idea of the newspaper as town square and marketplace of ideas. It became a place where no one dared speak out lest they, too, become the target of bullies. A community newspaper can and should do better than that, and I’m glad we did.”
Keith Whitcomb Jr., the day editor of the Banner, said the decision to remove anonymous commenting from the websites has helped raise the bar for civic discourse. “In the case of the Bennington Banner, usage was limited and what comments there were ended up being toxic at best,” Whitcomb said. “They offered nothing in the way of improving public discourse and if anything were a liability for us.”
Other findings in the Wired.com article include:
- Bellflower, California, had the distinction of being the most unlike its neighbors, coming in 335 percent more toxic than the rest of California; still, it isn’t the most toxic city in the U.S.
- Beverly, New Jersey, had the busiest commenters, with 114 authors responsible for 150,151 comments. That averages out to 1,317 comments each.
- Sharpsburg, Georgia, was judged the least toxic city in the U.S.
- Park Forest, Illinois, was seen as the most toxic city, with 34 percent of comments being hostile. But 99 percent of those came from just two authors.
- The most toxic time of day is 3 a.m. — with 11 percent of comments hitting that mark. The most talkative time was 9 p.m., with 10,971 comments on average.
Several Vermont publishers still allow comments, including VTDigger and Vermont Public Radio, both of which use Disqus.
Reached by email, Disqus’ Mario Paganini confirmed that the Wired.com analysis is based on the commenter’s location — not the host site’s — so comments written by Vermonters on national sites would also count toward the state’s trolling total. He also clarified that the analysis included data from January 2016 through April 2017. VTDigger started using Disqus in February 2017, so only three months of commenter data from this site would have been included.
Disqus used Perspective API, a tool developed by Google’s parent company, to score how much each comment reads as “rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable.” The site offers a “Writing Experiment” that allows users to test samples of text to see how likely they are to be rated as “toxic.” To unscientifically analyze how VTDigger comments stack up, we tested 24 hours of weekday comments using Perspective’s tool. (Two notes: This is by no means a representative sample, and the “Writing Experiment” tool provides only a preliminary estimate compared to the full analysis Disqus conducted using the API.) Here’s what we found:
- The average comment from this period was 24.8 percent likely to be rated as toxic.
- 15.3 percent of the comments reviewed were more likely than not to be rated toxic, meaning they scored over 50 percent.
- 1.8 percent of the comments reviewed were over 90 percent likely to be rated as toxic.
Paganini said his company’s collaboration with Wired.com aligned with its existing work. As early as next week, he said, Disqus plans “to release the ability to detect toxic comments to publishers so that they can deal with trolling and other toxic content more effectively.”
Do you have guesses about why Vermont tops the list for trolls, or other thoughts about Wired’s findings? You know where to leave them.
