Rage bait has become the Internet’s latest viral sensation. In exchange for being offensive and outrageous, posters get clicks and comments. Use of the phrase has tripled over the last 12 months, according to Oxford University Press, which has named “rage bait” its Word of the Year for 2025.

Here, communication scholar Angèle Christin breaks down what rage bait is, how to spot it, and the incentive structures driving outrage online. In her work, Christin has studied content creators and social media influencers to uncover the tactics they use to drive engagement.

Christin is an associate professor of communication in the School of Humanities and Sciences, a Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Fellow, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. 

Angèle Christin | Butcher Walsh

How is rage bait different from traditional clickbait, sensationalism, or tabloid headlines?

Rage bait is the negative, vengeful cousin of clickbait. Where clickbait titillates your imagination with an alluring headline (“You’ll never believe what happened next!”) that nudges you to click, rage bait engages negative emotions, often provoking you to make harsh comments.

Over the past two centuries, there have been many iterations of rage-bait-adjacent content, from human interest news sheets to tabloid talk shows and true-crime television. What’s different with rage bait, however, is that it usually originates among social media users seeking to maximize their online visibility and revenues. It travels fast, amplified by the algorithmic architecture of platforms and the negative engagement of audiences. And users interactively pile on, stoking each other’s outrage and anger in the process.

What are a few practical tips to identify rage bait – be it common rhetorical tricks or visual cues – we should look for?

Rage bait usually follows a recognizable formula: It features someone confidently stating or doing something outrageous, wrong, offensive, or gross.

This content short-circuits our attention pathways. The creator’s confident demeanor is often key, as is the absence of nuance: rage bait is absurdly inflammatory or extreme, in a way that seeks to provoke immediate anger.

One tactic that I use as a social media researcher is source analysis. I try to ask: Who is the person who posted that content? What other content do they share online? And what are their economic and political incentives in sharing that type of post?

How are generative AI tools changing the scale and sophistication of rage bait?

Generative AI tools make rage bait easier and faster to produce. Think of the fake video of President Trump wearing a gold crown and dumping brown sludge from a plane on protesters after the recent “No Kings” protest. No words were needed: the video – its plot and its aesthetics – did it all.

For many creators, generative AI is a boon: the technology enables them to push more content, which they hope will capture the attention of audiences and algorithms (in good or bad ways – it doesn’t matter) and go viral.

But social media outrage often has a short lifespan. For creators, an important question is how to make a lot of money in the long term. To do that, they usually need more than rage bait. 

Let’s talk about the business model. How is rage bait monetized? What pressures have you identified in your research with social media influencers that lead to this type of content?

Rage bait is particularly prevalent among content creators who make most of their money from platform payments (e.g., TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program, YouTube Partner Program, and Meta’s monetization program and bonuses). These influencers receive a share of the advertising revenues that their videos generate. The more views they get, the more money they receive.

For these creators, all publicity is good publicity: it doesn’t really matter whether the engagement is positive or negative, as long as users watch their content and interact with it through comments and shares to ensure maximum visibility on platforms.

In the short term, this strategy is effective if you’re good at manufacturing viral content. In the long run, however, chasing views is hard to sustain.

In the interviews I conducted with creators, many reported feeling exhausted and depressed by the unstable revenues they get, the pressure to post all the time, the difficulty of figuring out what “the algorithm” wants, and frequent “demonetization” (when the platform deems a video ineligible to receive compensation due to perceived violation of community guidelines).

After a while, viral creators seek other sources of revenue to complement platform payments. By then, however, new creators have replaced them and are posting content that is just as outrageous, extreme, and inflammatory.

Rage bait is only a fraction of social media (fortunately!), but it is a highly visible result of the economic incentives and engagement-based ecosystem that platforms have created for content creation.