Rage Bait: An Angering, Yet Original Engagement Hack

I was re-watching The Office, like I usually do when higher-order cognition is elusive, and S05E03 (Business Ethics) had a classic Jim (portrayed by John Krasinski) prank on Dwight (Rainn Wilson). After Dwight claimed to have never stolen time from the company by attending to personal matters at work, Jim went to deliberately trigger Dwight into a non-work conversation:

Jim: By any chance, did you see Battlestar Galactica last night?

Andy (played by Ed Helms): No, I did not. Was that any good?

Jim: Actually, no. It was really so-so.

Dwight: Ok. [Dwight turns around, but Jim holds up the stopwatch, threatening to start it]

Jim: I mean, I like all the crazy monsters and stuff. You know, like Klingons and Wookies and all that, but... [Dwight begins to turn around again, Jim holds up the watch] Sorry, was there something you wanted to add, Dwight?

Andy: Is that anything like the original Battlestar Galactica?

Jim: You know, it's weird. It's practically a shot-for-shot remake.

Andy: Really? [Dwight closes his eyes, clutches the paper in his hands] Huh, that's cool.

Jim: Story's kinda bland. It's about this guy named Dumbledore Calrissian who needs to return the ring back to Mordor.

Even before rage-baiting was a term, Jim was needling Dwight to elicit a reaction, because angry people engage more with content that upsets them. Today, deliberate provocation online fuels engagement metrics, and these numbers transform into revenue from social media platforms. It’s an oddly beneficial tactic used by content creators. This post is less about how rage baiting works, and more about how darkly creative some of the rage bait content is.

Source: Manfred antranias Zimmer / Pixabay.

In the world of artificial intelligence (AI), the originality of rage bait (and other kinds of) posts is unlimited. I recently became a mom, again, and came across an outrageous post advertising Lull, which is an “autonomous infant mobility platform.” Obviously AI-generated, it was accompanied by a video of a mother placing her baby in a driverless vehicle and programming it to go to “dad’s house.” Touted as a failsafe solution for baby-transport because “babies sleep when the car moves,” it was an absurd idea that had one purpose: to invoke a reaction from sleep-deprived parents. There was another post about a Robopod “launched” by Tesla, which was an autonomous stroller, with an AI-generated mother awkwardly walking beside it. For me, the most infuriating part was the suggestion that the infants were happy to have no contact with their caregiver. I know it was fake and it was a rage bait post, but I felt irritated (and amused) nonetheless.

Rage bait posts can be darkly creative, as their goal is to provoke and supersede our thinking brain into giving a visceral reaction. They are often rather original, even though they harm by way of inducing negative emotions.

Source: Omar Nasif / Pixabay

The content is often intentionally framed as novel, unique, or priceless, offering the bait to scrollers. Recommending strange food pairings as being the best in the world or making contentious claims about health trends can infuriate some users, who engage with these posts to express their counterpoints. Usually, no one gets brownie points for being correct on the Internet, but motivated users still try. Rage bait capitalises on this tendency and serves up creative and at times ridiculous posts that aim to instigate.

Emotion-driven content is highly clickable because it triggers users into having, if not sharing, an opinion about the post. It is also ingeniously creative because the more original the content, the more likely it is to enrage different users in different ways. Consider a post that not only discusses the merits of pineapple on pizza but also claims that garlic bread with pineapple puree makes for a great appetizer. Pizza purists will disagree wholeheartedly, and such a post would rake in the views and comments, all converting into big bucks for the poster. I would argue that the more absurd, weird, surprising, and enraging the post, the greater the engagement, making this a fertile ground for dark creativity. Given how online content is mushrooming, analysing rage bait content would be a great way to test this hypothesis.