Ragebait and 'anti-woke' content
A Hustle Crew deep dive into the internet trend of ragebait
‘A guy bit into a Kit-Kat bar in the weirdest way and everyone is telling his girlfriend to break up with him’
An actual headline from Business Insider
Rude baristas. Bad date stories. Controversial conspiracy theories. Sexist behaviour. People taking a bite out of the middle of a KitKat. These days, people get mad on the internet about a whole load of different things, ranging from reasonable to very unreasonable. Say hello to ‘rage bait’. The latest form of internet manipulation.
Let’s break it down. ‘Rage’ and ‘bait’ - when you unpack the meaning of these two words, you can’t help but wonder why on earth you’d want to ‘bait’ ‘rage’? To the untrained eye, it sounds like a terrible idea. But, for bright-eyed and bushy-tailed internet creators, anger equals engagement. It’s as simple as that.
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Yep, people love to rile each other up. Pretty depressing, isn’t it? Medium wrote that ‘there’s something about human nature that loves to respond to anger more than any other emotion.’ In a similar vein, Rolling Stone says:
“The bait doesn’t just work - it thrives [...] The growth and prevalence of rage-bait content can make it continually harder for people to accurately fact-check videos in front of them.”
Whether it’s microaggressions or full-blown far-right exposure videos, TikTok acts as a breeding ground for hate and violence, fuelling ‘the war on woke’ and feeding the flames of hostility to inclusion initiatives.
The Independent has even gone as far as to say that:
“The algorithms that keep these platforms running tend to prioritise content that elicits and evokes outrage to maximise engagement, no matter the cost.”
TikTok doesn’t only house hateful content - it also endorses it. The question is, how do we, as a society, stop feeding into such reckless hate and undo our algorithms?
Spotting the signs: The tricky thing about rage baiting is that it’s pretty skilled at sailing under the radar. On the surface, the content can seem credible, and therefore hard to avoid. Is your feed full of offensive language? Move on. Is it filled with random theories? Keep scrolling. It’s important to steer clear of content that seems manufactured to provoke.
Consider before you comment: Everyone knows that giving attention to a hostile situation only makes it worse. Just because you’ve encountered rage bait, doesn’t mean you should engage with it. If you spot harmful rage bait content, either ignore it or report it. Don’t give the creator who orchestrated such provocative content what they want.
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