The Rage Bait Business
Pissing people off for profit
You’ve probably read something on the Internet recently that really pissed you off. It’s hard to avoid online idiocy. Your friends share examples of the latest dumb shit somebody squeezed out of their keyboard. You try to avoid divisive fuckwits but yet divisive fuckwits keeps finding you.
There’s certainly lots of rage bait online nowadays. Many a social media influencer has risen to fame by posting wildly incorrect information, espousing ignorant opinions, or simply behaving like an asshole. Online streamer Johnny Somali is currently under house arrest in South Korea after antics that included bumping and grinding against a “comfort woman” statue and threatening to inject Korean women with HIV+ syringes.
Bodycam Declassified is yet another company that profit from the outrage algorithm. While a quick viewer might mistake stories like Arrogant Police Officer Pulls Over Black FBI Agent and Lives To Regret It for bodycam footage, the fine print explains that these are “reenactments using professional actors to clarify key events.” Their morality tales of racist police and entitled Karens get thousands of angry comments and millions of views.
While rage bait has been getting a lot of attention recently, it’s hardly a new phenomenon. Back in the 1990s Usenet was full of “trolls” who got their jollies by making other readers hop up and down. (Full disclosure: I spent a great deal of time under the bridge in those halcyon days). Early adapters of online discourse noted the vitriol and “flame wars.”
One industrious troll proposed a new group entitled “alt.fuck.the.skull.of.jesus” to several dozen Usenet forums. Many readers immediately added their thoughts on the skull of Jesus and why it should or should not be fucked. For months it spread across Usenet like a fungal infection. What was its purpose? You could just as readily ask that question to the people who posted goatse.cx links to knitting forums. The Internet gave the world a voice, and many used that voice to annoy random strangers.
Is rage bait baked into social media communications, or is it the latest hip marketing tool? Let’s unpack this phenomenon, and let’s start by figuring out why it works.
In the days of BBSes and Usenet, individual posts were sorted by date. Unless you chose to block annoying posters, you got a one-size-fits-all selection of reading material. The most active boards and forums might see a few hundred posts per day, so sorting the wheat from the chaff was an annoyance at best.
Today X handles around 6,000 Xeets every second — about 200 billion per annum! On an average day TikTok users upload 23.65 million videos. Every month 3.07 billion people use Facebook. Nobody could keep up with that fire hose of information. To make the individual user experience more comfortable, social media developers have created algorithms designed to serve viewers with material that keeps them engaged.
That “engaged” word is important. These algorithms don’t just go by posts that you like or other accounts that you follow. It places the greatest weight on articles that you engage with — articles that you reply to or repost. But it turns out we’re more likely to respond to things we disagree with. And the stronger our disagreement, the more likely we are to reply.
What this means in practice is that the more you respond in anger, the more anger-inducing content gets pumped into your feed. If you start following fellow travelers who make particularly witty comebacks, the cycle escalates. Before you know it you’re spending a great deal of time fighting with evildoers and malcontents and united with a tribe bonded together by shared hate.
The primary political cause driving these social media rage-baiters is capitalism. Rage bait draws clicks, eyeballs, and advertising money. Most rage bait is not part of a world domination conspiracy, it’s marketers giving the people what they want. So long as people keep responding to rage bait, influencers and algorithms will keep on serving it up.
You will, I hope, note that I said most rage bait. There are lots of performative putzes looking for attention by any means necessary. But we’ve certainly seen rage bait used as a political tool, and few modern politicians are foolish enough to ignore social media. Let’s take a look at how rage bait has shaped our political landscape.
Cohen hits publish on the story — six paragraphs topped with a photo of the president smirking that he found by Googling "Trump sneaky" — to Rivero's website, Occupy Democrats. Then he posts it to the site's Facebook page, which boasts nearly seven million followers, more than the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post.
A mob of comments, shares, and clicks quickly flows in. "Freaking DISGRACEFUL!!!" one woman writes. "That sneaky, backstabbing, yellow bellied coward," another comments. Hundreds of readers hit the red angry-face icon.
Brittany Shammas, “How Mexican-American Twins From Miami Created the Liberal Powerhouse Occupy Democrats”,
Miami New Times, September 26, 2017
On September 21, 2012 brothers Omar and Rafael Rivero started a Facebook page they called "Occupy Democrats." Today you’ll still find its shrieking denouncements of Trump, Republicans, conservatives, etc. spewed across the Internet. Their message is as subtle as their TRADEMARK black-and-yellow palate. But over 10 million Facebook subscribers hang on their every word.
LoTT is devoted to “content that's meant to degrade or shame” and posts that are merely forms of “bullying and harassing a private individual, targeting them on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity” (the text in bold italics here and below are citations from Meta’s Bullying and harassment and Hate speech policies). Of course the engagement generated by the account creates enormous profits, both for account-owner Raichik and for Meta.
It seems difficult to imagine that Meta genuinely believes these posts are NOT “expressing contempt and disgust” for the people, organizations, and institutions being targeted. As has been extensively documented, the account’s targeting and incitement is creating a variety of offline harms, in addition to the very real harm that results simply from public bullying and harassment, which Meta also claims it prohibits (“We do not tolerate this kind of behavior because it prevents people from feeling safe and respected on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.”).
Alejandra Caraballo,
“Policies vs. Enforcement: What’s Up with Meta’s Platforming of Violent Extremist Hate Account “Libs of TikTok”?”
TechPolicy.press, March 21, 2024
From the right, we have Chaya Raichik’s popular Libs of Tik Tok. Raichik got her start reposting idiocy she found on TikTok, but gained fame for her crusades against LGBT child groomers and open borders activists. This has earned her the hatred of GLAAD, SPLC, Wikipedia, and many social media profiles with pronouns and identity flags.
Both Raichik and the Rivero brothers are widely mocked and scorned by the other side. Each is presented as an example of why [Liberals/Conservatives] have to lie because they can’t handle the truth. Both make a tidy profit by pissing off their supporters. And both have an outsized political influence.
Occupy Democrats has rallied left-leaning Boomers like a fat joint of angel dust-laced Colombian Gold. And LibsofTikTok has radicalized many conservatives against Democratic pedophiles and Drag Queen Story Hour groomers. It might be too much to say that the Riveros brought Biden to office in 2020 or that Raichik sparked the current backlash against LGBT excesses. But they certainly helped.
OD and LoTT are both unabashedly partisan. They have no interest in building bridges with the other side, and they’re proud of the fact that their opponents hate them. They’re not out to expand their following but to rile up their base. And while we might prefer a more nuanced approach, Johnny Somali and Bodycam Declassified could tell them you get more attention with shrieking and melodrama.
If you’re looking to use rage bait for your own ends, you’ll be facing lots of competitors. The good news is that most of your competitors are only focused on getting attention or earning a living. There’s a lot of unexplored territory left for people who want to use the rage bait instinct to change the world.
If you’re going to use rage bait effectively, you must first be able to spot it and to act accordingly. If you must respond, do so with a purpose. (And don’t rely on the old “I must speak out against this harmful idiocy to warn others” excuse. You can’t reason somebody out of an emotional state they never reasoned themselves into). If you’re responding with a “witty quip,” make sure it’s actually funny. Venting is rarely funny. Ask Stephen Colbert if you don’t believe me.
Be aware of rage bait’s limitations. Most of the people who respond to your rage bait only want to let off steam. You’re their emotional equivalent of a Fleshlight that provides momentary release. You will have to wade through an awful lot of dung before you find any diamonds worth polishing.
On the other hand, angry background noises can be useful. Many, perhaps most, people, shape their social persona based on what those around them think. If they see lots of anger aimed at a particular topic, they may decide that topic is bad and should be attacked. Or they may decide it’s not worth arguing about, and, as many never tire of reminding us, silence is consent. For years trans activists used shrieking men in dresses to cow their opponents into submission.
But remember that rage bait has a shelf life. After a while what once generated tooth-gnashing anger gets only a shrug. Trans activists are learning that lesson now. No matter how hard they double down, their opposition has reached a critical mass and can no longer be intimidated into silence. And as they double down, they only drive away more of their dwindling followers. If you’re going to target somebody for a rage campaign, be ready to pull back once you start seeing diminishing returns.
While rage bait can be a weapon, it can also be a potent recruiting tool. How many people voted for Donald Trump because he drove obnoxious people into amusing temper tantrums? You can bond over shared enemies as easily as shared friends. If those enemies pose a threat — or if you can convince people they do — you may even have an easier time convincing them to set aside their differences and work with you.
Choose your targets wisely and with discretion. Rage bait works remarkably well when it’s aimed at the right people and used in moderation. If rage bait is all you have, you may soon find yourself more hated than your targets. Or you may simply be ignored as yet another shrieking hysteric. It took a while, but today most have stopped taking the opinions of Cluster B dangerhairs seriously. If you emulate the behavior that led to their brief and limited successes, you’ll soon relive their failure.
Rage bait is a stick that should be employed along with a carrot. Libs of TikTok regularly cc’s the FBI X account on her posts. There’s no reason to suppose the FBI pays any attention — they get cc’ed thousands of times a day by kooks reporting gangstalking and angry people who just lost an argument. But she offers the hope that something will be done about this latest atrocity. Bodycam Declassified’s most successful videos end with the racist cop or entitled Karen humiliated. Making your opponent look threatening and vile is good. Making them look unbeatable is not.
Ultimately, rage bait is a good servant but a bad master. The self-righteous dopamine rush you get from taking rage bait can be every bit as addictive as the dopamine hits you get from cocaine. The feeling of victory you get from telling off some online idiot is as illusory as cocaine self-confidence. And as with cocaine, the only people who profit from rage bait are the ones who are selling it — and only so long as they avoid getting high on their own supply.
Endless niches of human activities. Thank you for the article analyzing the rage bate business niche.