In 2025, the phrase "rage bait"—the practice of creating provocative content to elicit anger—was the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year. Your anger on seeing something outrageous on the internet is being monetized for profit and is contributing to the polarization of our country and the world. Anger itself is being turned into profit, and not infrequently, the content is a lie.
Anyone who uses the internet, and especially social media, is exposed to what is known as clickbait. The "bait" term is analogous to fishing, where a hook is disguised by worm bait. Clickbait is a text or a link designed to attract your attention and entice you to "click" on that link to read the linked piece of online content. This content is typically sensationalized and frequently misleading. It teases you by giving just enough information to make you curious, but not enough to satisfy that curiosity without clicking through the linked content. Many times, the clickbait headlines are at least partially dishonest by using enticements that do not accurately reflect the actual content delivered.
Rage baiting is a type of clickbaiting by eliciting outrage with the goal of increasing internet traffic and online engagement—frequently with the goal of increasing revenue for the source or for political gain. When a person responds to an inflammatory post with an equally inflammatory tweet, they are rewarding the original poster. Social media algorithms like Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube reward increased positive and negative responses by directing traffic back to those chatting and amplifying them. They sell more advertising that way by using these sites to then target pre-existing biases of filtered audiences.
This is not new, but it is increasingly insidious and dangerous. In 2006, a Time Magazine article described how internet trolls—people who intentionally post inflammatory, offensive, or disruptive content online to provoke strong emotional reactions, frequently anonymously—were posting disruptive content. It didn’t take long for political actors to intentionally incorporate emotional content into their messaging by provoking anxiety on a topic. A study in the Journal of Politics in 2012 found that the emotion of anger, in particular, increased response clicks on political websites.
The 2020 Netflix docudrama "The Social Dilemma" analyzed how social media was intentionally designed to profit through internet manipulation by the spreading of disinformation and conspiracy theories. The film shows how social media increases political polarization, radicalization, and fake news, and is used as PR by the political parties. The social media networks use this to increase advertisement income for themselves and the influencers.
An influencer is a social media personality in a specific niche that creates content like videos, photos, and reviews to guide their followers' opinions and purchasing decisions. They earn money through brand deals, affiliate marketing, and advertising revenue from platforms like YouTube and Facebook, which share a portion of the revenue generated by ads placed in an influencer's video content.
Sports figures like soccer players Ronaldo and Messi, and pop culture icons like Selena Gomez and Kylie Jenner, have millions of followers and make millions of dollars annually from social media. Political influencers like right-leaning Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, deceased Charlie Kirk, and left-leaning influencers like Hasan Piker, David Parkman, Brian Cohen, the hosts of Pod Save America, and the progressive debater Dean Withers, make substantial sums ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 per post. Sites such as Fox News and Breitbart on the right and MSNBC, HuffPost, TikTok, and CNN on the left use attention-grabbing headlines to increase their website clicks and advertising revenue. So, I might add, does all mainstream news without necessarily qualifying as rage baiting.
When I was in politics, I wrote many fundraising letters using topics that would increase interest in donating to my campaign. Raising emotions about the importance of the topic to the nation's welfare is not rage baiting any more than a snappy headline. The difference is whether claims can be factually backed up. To some degree, this depends on the readers' points of view. What is incendiary rage bait to one may be the truth to another. It is when the charge is clearly misleading or outright false that the advocacy dips into rage or clickbaiting on the internet.
An example of possible rage baiting frequently cited shows that something called rage bait may be largely in the eye of the beholder. In November 2018, National Review decried social-justice warriors in an article. National Review's article was in response to tweets criticizing the cartoon image used by ABC’s Twitter account to advertise "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving." Franklin, Charlie Brown's Black friend, was sitting all alone on one side of the dinner table. Several Twitter users called the image racist. Conservatives were upset by these politically correct posts and, in turn, responded in anger.
Whether an internet post qualifies as rage bait many times depends on the viewpoint or bias of the reader. Nevertheless, it is a real phenomenon. For more examples of rage bait, I suggest the Rolling Stone article, "These Influencers Are Making Content to Make You Angry—And It's Working" (C.T. Jones, Rolling Stone, February 27, 2024). Another source is "The Rise of Ragebait: From Bizarre Influencer Lies To Insidious Political Strategies" in Centennial Team, February 12, 2025.
This is not just a problem in the United States. In 2021, Facebook devoted only 16 percent of its budget to fighting hate speech overseas. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported on the significant role of social media in inciting ethnic violence in Myanmar and the Rohingya genocide. Countries like India are particularly vulnerable to hate speech and incitements to violence on social media because platforms there do little to police content.
Rage bait doesn't just limit effective communication in the digital space. It helps build silos where we fall into information bubbles and have less understanding of what others outside our bubble are feeling and discussing. It makes us less inclined to hear opposing views, which in turn deepens divisions. And it makes it easy to spread lies and misinformation, at the very least taking things out of context. Anger can push us to take action. The anonymity of the internet takes away social norms and civility that we follow when confronting people directly in person.
Wall Street Journal opinion writer Peggy Noonan recently wrote, "We live in a cold political world of cocoons, bubbles and silos, and few feel safe to occupy the land between. It is a world in which people are obsessed with claiming their rights and not accepting their duties. Public speech is mean, strength is vulgar."
How do we prevent rage baiting? First, we have to be aware of it. We need to look for it. We need to moderate our surges of anger and count to ten before rapping out a nasty comment that we can never take back. The best way to decrease rage baiting is to not respond at all. If necessary, we can block habitual rage baiters. If we feel we must respond, do it courteously by asking, "What do you mean?" We need to remind ourselves that the comment section is not the real world. By doing so, we can reshape our own digital world by seeking out the positive and avoiding the negative. We can reclaim our own algorithms.
If we read something that strikes us as outrageous, be skeptical before getting angry. Long ago, Euripides noted, "Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of knowing what not to believe."
Greg Ganske, MD, is a retired plastic surgeon who cared for women with breast cancer, children with cleft lips, farmers with hand injuries, trauma, and burn patients. He served Iowa in the United States Congress from 1995-2003.