How content creators profit from rage-baiting
This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.
Have you ever found yourself angry or outraged at a piece of content on social media? A disgusting recipe or shocking opinion? It could be intentional.
Social media influencer Winta Zesu freely admits that she provokes for profit.
“Every single video of mine that has gained, like, millions and millions of views is because of hate comments,” she said.
The 24-year-old estimates she made $150,000 last year by exploiting an online trend known as rage-baiting.
“Literally, just if people get mad, the video is gonna go viral. I can make money on TikTok. Instagram is paying, like, YouTube pays you. So I was like, OK, I’m just gonna post everything on every platform.”
She’s part of a growing group of online creators making rage-bait content, where the goal is simple: record videos, produce memes and write posts that make other users viscerally angry, then bask in the thousands, or even millions, of shares and likes.
“The more content they create, the more engagement they get, the more that they get paid,” said Andréa Jones, a marketing strategist based in Toronto, Canada. “Even if, even if those views are negative or inciting rage and anger in people.”
Experts say its popularity is due to the way the algorithms are designed, which determine what users see.
“If we see a cat, we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s cute.’ We scroll on,” Jones said. “But if we see someone doing something obscene, we may type in the comments, ‘This is terrible,’ and that sort of comment is seen as a higher-quality engagement by the algorithm.”
But for Ariel Hasell, assistant professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan, the negatives are clear.
“One of the things that we see happen is that people are sort of overwhelmed by negativity in these environments,” she said. “The concern is that long term, we won’t be able to get anybody’s attention and get them to pay attention to the things that we hope that they should be paying attention to.”
We contacted the major social media platforms to see what they had to say about rage-bait on their sites. At the time of publication, we had no responses, but we do know it is on their radar.
In October, a Meta executive took to Threads to report “an increase in engagement-bait” on the platform, adding, “we’re working to get it under control.” But if rage-bait continues to pay, it’s likely to continue to appear in our social feeds.
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