Rage Bait
In honor of Oxford University Press naming ‘rage bait’ as their 2025 Word of the Year, let’s play a little game I like to call: Find the Fake Headline …
Rage bait is online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive. Most of us will claim to know it when we see it… but do we? Do we know when our emotions are being manipulated while we’re doomscrolling in the middle of the night? Are we careful in considering what we end up writing ourselves, in response to the rage bait we’re bombarded with online?
See if you can determine which headlines below are real and or accompany an article that contains straightforward, evidence-backed claims, and which ones are fake or misleading or only designed to elicit outrage. Full disclosure: I made some of them up.
“AI Shrinks Are Hurting Our Kids”
“Mom Coerced into COVID Vaccine, Died”
“Ten Ways to Impress Anyone”
“This One Trick Will Make Your Boss Hate You”
“How Politics Are Ripping Us Apart”
“The Last Generation That Will Understand Real Music”
“Are doctors becoming nothing more than glorified drug reps?”
“FDA to raise hurdles for vaccines, faulting COVID shots for 10 kids’ deaths”
“The Day the Tech World Turned Upside Down”
“Your Kids Don’t Need College (Here’s Why)”
“The Truth About Why Your Shoe Fetish Is Ruining Society”
“Why This Fad Diet Works for Everyone but You”
“Big Tech Wants to Replace Your Therapist with a Machine”
“Will regular romantic rendezvous with AI ruin your IRL relationships?”
“Why Men Really Despise Everything Women Do”
“The AI Industry That’s Selling Fake Empathy”
“Your kids won’t make it if they don’t have this ONE skill.”
“Why WFH Is Making You Lazy (And Your Coworkers Hate You)”
“They’re coming for YOUR house next!”
“Mom Who Died from Vaccine Was Coerced by Government”
“I let my kid skip school every day for a week. Here’s what happened…”
“Is Taylor Swift’s new album actually secretly terrible?”
“Five Reasons Why the Government is Spying on You”
“The One Food You Should Never Eat Again”
“Do women really need men to be happy?”
What do you think about those headlines? Did any of them elicit strong emotions from you? If so, why do you think that is? And which of those headlines would you classify as ‘rage bait’ and why?
I’m curious how many people, especially writers (who tend to be more adept at noticing and wielding the power of language) make it a point to actively pay attention to the emotions the content they come across elicits. Why? Because such content will inevitably affect what they decide to write, as well, which will in turn affect what some of their readers write, and so on. And I think this rage bait cycle is why it sometimes feels like we’re living in digital echo chambers of doom and gloom that seem impossible to escape.
Rage bait is effective at keeping people engaged because it triggers strong negative emotions and reactions like anger, fear, and moral outrage. And this in turn triggers its consumers to absorb then regurgitate those same strong negative emotions into whatever they create and or share too.
So, rage bait is essentially a form of propaganda in the twenty-first century because while it elicits high engagement, it offers no real substance to back its claims, as its primary goal is to instigate volatile reactions from its intended consumers and create divisions between groups of people in the real world, rather than inform and empower anyone.
We are highly susceptible to becoming what we read and write when we aren’t reading and writing with a critical yet humane lens, which we don’t often do when we are doomscrolling and taking most of the content we encounter at face value, especially the content we fundamentally agree with.
Sure, we can blame the algorithms for this bombardment of rage bait and volatile content, but only to a certain extent, as we can still decide not to write, consume, or engage with content that is making us feel strong, negative emotions.
If you ever find yourself saying things like “This is so wrong!” or “Finally, someone said it!” then you might be consuming rage bait. Luckily, however, you can always write your way out of it. Read How I Turned My Doomscrolling into Active Healing, and You Can Too for more details on this.
What are your thoughts and feelings on rage bait? Leave a comment to join this dialogue.
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