I was scrolling through TikTok the other day, and I came across a girl who was showing us her daily coffee. She started by showing her CoffeeMate creamer, and it seemed like a casual coffee-making video. However, she proceeded to pour the entire bottle of creamer into her cup, add a drop of coffee, stir it up, and drink it. She acted like this was her daily coffee and was totally casual about it – this enraged the people. There were millions of hate comments about how unhealthy and gross it was. Then, a day later, she came across my feed again, doing the same thing, with the same millions of hate comments. This, I realized, was an act of rage-bait.
Rage-bait is plaguing our social media feeds. It’s become so common that the pattern has become recognizable and formulated into academia, stating that:
“It features someone confidently stating or doing something outrageous, wrong, offensive, or gross […] that nudges you to click.” (Christin, Stanford Report)Â
I feel that this act of content creation is almost taking away the integrity of how the internet started. I remember as a child, you would go onto YouTube, and there would be multitudes of feel-good content: slime videos, DIY, makeup tutorials, and much more, but much of it has been lost to this idea of rage-baiting.Â
Clearly, rage-baiting content is what will ultimately get the most views. Unfortunately, the reason rage bait works is because anger is one of the most influential emotions, along with sadness and humor. This is interestingly shown by Jonah Berger and Katherin L Milkman, who noted that anger is a “high arousal emotion favoring sharing,” which contributes to rage-bait’s virality (Berger & Milkman 2013).Â
Although they noted that happy content is the most likely to go viral, this article came out in 2013 – times are different now. Now, people get joy out of posting hate comments across platforms due to the fact that they can hide behind their screens. Rage baiters get all of their revenue from clicks and shares that ultimately have it out for them. To take it back to the coffee creator, her entire comment section was flooded with terrible words about her coffee to ultimately degrading her physical appearance. What I found most interesting is seeing these comments and still going to the creators’ page and finding more of these exact videos, still filled with these awful comments. Unfortunately, in this day and age, content creators are willing to sacrifice their online image or persona for more clicks and views.
Ultimately, rage bait has become the armageddon for the internet. Creators are more often than not posting to receive a reaction rather than for their own (and others’) enjoyment. In my opinion, it’s truly a sad thing that every day I go on social media, there are a plethora of creators and commenters who are just desperate to upset other people. In the end, despite rage bait occasionally being funny, it truly is ruining the collective internet that we used to have.