What is rage bait and how can you avoid it?

How many times have you opened social media and seen something that whips you into a frenzy of unreasonable anger? 

There’s a name for this subsection of online content: rage bait.  

Dr Simon Copland is an expert in the manosphere, a term that describes internet communities dedicated to anti-feminism. He says rage bait is content that is deliberately designed to make people mad.  

“The classic example is people who create really terrible recipes designed to make you angry,” Copland says. 

“Creators get money, influence or political capital off engagement.  

“Creating fake news articles – or overemphasising particular parts of news articles – to create anger directed at certain groups of people can lead to political outcomes, such as greater engagement with a political party or right-wing figure. And that’s often deliberately done.” 

Copland adds that these campaigns often utilise “the usual suspects for scapegoats” – people of colour, immigrants, LGBTIQ+ people and women.  

“And with rage bait or false material, it can spread really quickly, well before anybody gets a chance to show that it’s wrong.”  

An example of this is misinformation that wilfully misused a statistic from a real study to delegitimise refugees – that 80 per cent of refugees in Sweden frequently holidayed in their home country.  

“If you look at the actual report, what it found was the vast majority of those people had come to Sweden over 15 years ago and came from countries that were now safe to return to. They have now settled and made lives in Sweden, and are able to holiday back home because those places have become safer, not because they weren’t ‘real’ refugees.” Copland says. 

“The rage bait was deliberately designed to make people very angry at refugees using fake or changed statistics.” 

Wielding rage as a weapon

Copland has spent years researching the dark depths of the web. His new book, The male complaint, explores the social structures that make allow these sorts of online spaces to thrive. 

 What he has found is that there are particular ways rage bait is utilised.  

“There are all these kinds of figures out there who are looking at making people angry and then turning it into profit for themselves,” Copland says. “People like Andrew Tate are engaged in a form of rage bait. I would call them grifters who creates fake products and fake courses.” 

“Now, Tate might not believe that anything that he’s creating is fake, he might truly believe what he is saying. But he’s creating something that’s specifically designed to make people angry, particularly at women, and direct them to his courses and ways he makes money.” 

“We have a society now where people are increasingly feeling quite hopeless”

But consuming content from these social media personalities is not a straightforward pipeline from rage bait to complete radicalisation.  

Research into white supremacist groups has found that extremists target socially isolated people who may be looking for a community. The ideology comes after building a sense of connection.  

“It’s true for a lot of these kind of extremist groups – that the people who are going in initially are looking for some sort of connection – even if it’s subconsciously – or they’ve got complaints about their lives and they’re trying to understand those issues,” Copland says. 

“That helps explain why these ideologies don’t appeal to everybody. You have to have these underlying insecurities or fears about the world before that story appeals to you.” 

How to avoid the trap

With all this said, how can we avoid falling into the rage bait trap? 

A starting point is to consider the motivations a creator might have for getting you worked up and decide whether you want to reward that behaviour.  

“People aren’t influencers on the internet out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because it gets them credibility and money and influence,” Copland says. “And they’re not going to go and deliberately create terrible things if it’s going to destroy their credibility, money and influence. So, what are they doing it for?” 

Taking a step back when you are feeling angry online, slowing down to consider whether you need more information, understanding who is sharing or producing and what else they are sharing on their page are all ways to stop your emotions getting the better of you.  

“What I’ve done, personally – and it’s probably come from years researching this and being online too much – is I try not to respond immediately, particularly for issues that are new to me,” Copland says. 

“Is it worth getting angry about a bad recipe a stupid video that someone posted? And is that going to be worth my energy and my time? And if you step back sometimes and give yourself half an hour, you’ll realise that you’ve forgotten about it, and then it’s gone.”  

But there are times when it is ok to be angry at things you see online – Copland cites the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza as issues he posts angrily about.  

“Social media has created these places where activity is happening, but people often have very little engagement,” Copland says.  

“They might be in part of the group, but you don’t do that deeper organising of getting together and talking with people, because actions that can have political influence often happen more when you’re in doing the face-to-face and organising.”  

Turning that anger into useful education and action that does not scapegoat others can help people to avoid the pitfalls of rage bait and curb interest in extremist online spaces. 

“We have a society now where people are increasingly feeling quite hopeless – people now look into the future and they believe their future will be worse than their parents’. That makes a lot of these communities much more potent.” Copland says. 

“But also, people are right to be angry. Young people are right to be angry that they have potentially no access to buying a house, or ensuring people have secure jobs, ensuring we deal with climate change.  

“The solution has to be hope but grounded in reality.”