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Rage Baiting: The Toxic Trend That Has Taken Over Social Media
I’m sure you’ve fallen for it many times…
(You can read this article for free by clicking here.)
Have you ever watched a video that upset you so much, that you wondered, “How can anyone say something like that?!” and you ended up commenting angrily even though you rarely leave comments?
Well, chances are, you were rage baited.
Rage baiting is when someone purposely posts content to get a negative reaction from people to get attention, engagement, and money.
It’s unfortunately a quick and effective way to grow a channel and is especially rampant on TikTok, where rage bait videos can get millions of views in one day.
When you leave a comment on TikTok, you’re showing the algorithm that the content is engaging and it will keep promoting that video to other people and will also keep showing you similar content.
TikTok doesn’t care that the video they’re promoting is rage bait, they just care that people are clicking on the video, watching the entire thing, and leaving comments.
But TikTok is not the only place where rage bait exists. It’s across all social media platforms and can be in the form of videos, podcasts, and articles. Pretty much any way you consume content, you’re sure to find rage bait.
In a 2022 article on Insider, Tonya Chen writes about the rise of rage bait and why it does so well.
“Social media platforms don’t care if the message is uplifting or toxic. As long as people are interacting with it, platforms will spread it even further.”
Out of all the types of content out there, rage gets the most engagement.
There’s something about human nature that loves to respond to anger more than any other emotion.
Writer Helen A.S. Popkin highlights this point in her article for NBC News,
“Anger is the most viral emotion on the Internet. The examination of how we humans are influenced by friends on social media, conducted by researchers at Beihang University in China, found that friends and followers are far more…
