Remain calm – ‘rage bait’ has been listed as Oxford Dictionary’s ‘word of the year’ for 2025.
You might be thinking ‘what does rage bait mean?’. Well, if you ever find yourself doom-scrolling through social media and becoming agitated by content you, you are a victim of rage bait.
It happens to the best of us. Rage bait content is designed to provoke an extreme emotion reaction from the consumer using extreme or controversial topics, opinions and scenarios. Rage bait is a tool used to manipulate social media algorithms by causing users to repost or leave comments, resulting in ‘high engagement’ that encourages social media platforms to show the posts to a wider audience.
Humans are naturally predisposed to have a ‘negativity bias’, which means we pay closer attention to threats than positives. This instinct to respond to negativity means provocative content spreads faster by generating more engagement.
If you are reading this and realising that perhaps you have been unintentionally responding to rage bait, the good news is that there are steps you can take to bring the ‘zen’ back into your evening social media scroll.
The first step, as with many things, is recognising the issue. Here’s a tip – if you see any of the following words in a post, you’re probably looking at rage bait:
Next, inaction will serve you best in this case. Refusing to rise to rage bait and refraining from leaving a comment will help to reduce the content ability to spread. To limit the amount of rage bait you are exposed to, you can also tidy up your feed by unfollowing or muting creators who create content that bring negative vibes.
President of Oxford Languages Casper Grathwohl said, “The fact that the word rage bait exists and has seen such a dramatic surge in usage means we’re increasingly aware of the manipulation tactics we can be drawn into online.
“Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions, and how we respond.
“It feels like the natural progression in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human in a tech-driven world – and the extremes of online culture.”
