As Fatumata Dia scrolled through her TikTok feed, she paused on a seemingly harmless makeup video from content creator Meredith Duxbury.
In the video, Duxbury attempts to dot her face with 1,000 drops of foundation.
More than a minute passed before the sophomore international affairs major realized there was no point to the video. Duxbury had drawn her into watching what’s known as a “rage bait” video.
Rage bait, or content intended to get an emotional reaction out of people through provocative statements and actions, is typically nonsensical or dramatic, from putting on excessive amounts of makeup to making polarized claims to spark disagreement.
While Dia considers these kinds of videos “a waste of time,” she said they are inescapable on her social media feeds.
“It’s really just how society works at this point, how social media works,” she said.
Rage bait is common on social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok and X. Introducing social media monetization features like X’s Super Follows and Tips could incentivize creators to make hyper-engaging content like rage bait to get more likes and views.
However, some experts say the payout is not worth the harmful effects.
Dr. Kay Coghill is a scholar, activist and storyteller who studies online gender-based violence and uses they/them pronouns.
“It really upsets me because there’s already a lot of online harassment happening, especially as it pertains to Black women and non-binary femmes, and there’s already a lack of recourse and consequences for those actions,” Coghill said.
According to them, rage bait has increased on X since Elon Musk acquired the social media platform in 2022.
“Some of the things that I’ve seen more recently are folks [saying] disparaging things about Black women or Black Americans to start discussions around the reasonings why they don’t like them or why they feel like they should experience harm and things of that nature,” they said.
But while this content may exist online, Coghill believes it could have consequences outside of social media.
“I feel like a lot of this online violence can materialize into physical violence off the internet,” Coghill said. “And I feel like rage bait is a way or an avenue for folks to perpetuate this violence that they may want to perpetuate in the physical world.”
Ingrid Sturgis, chair of the Media, Journalism and Film department at Howard’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications, said she encountered rage bait as early as 2005. As the editor-in-chief of essence.com, she saw online criticism over Essence’s work, like their monthly top 10 books of the month, often evolve into angry, unproductive conversations.
“For regular people, I don’t really see the benefits to it, because it leaves you feeling bad. It leaves you feeling negative. It leaves you feeling drained. It leaves you feeling confused,” Sturgis said.
Although the term “rage bait” is not widely used in academic research, Dr. Gyo Hyun Koo, an assistant professor at Howard’s Department of Communication, Culture, and Media Studies, believes it is a cause for concern in her area of study.
“There is a substantial amount of research that shows that online content that builds outrage or anger can potentially make our society more divisive and also make people more vulnerable to misinformation,” Koo said.
Elijah Williams, a sophomore film and television production major, often sees rage bait on X. He said he tries to find the humor in it but infrequent social media users may not know how to navigate rage bait when it appears on their feeds.
“I feel like for older people, well, not even just older people, all people who are maybe not on social media that much, they tend to believe it’s real at first. So they’ll just run with it, and then it can kind of cause this paranoia,” Williams said.
To identify rage bate, Williams said he relies on research to refrain from depending on information shared by creators who may exaggerate for engagement.
But according to Koo, there is no exact science for identifying rage bait, especially because all social media platforms are different. Still, she encouraged media users to avoid those who consistently post questionable content.
“Generally speaking, I would encourage students or media users to check the content creator’s profile and their feed to identify if there’s any patterns in their posts, such as whether they’re consistently creating provocative content and stirring controversy, manipulating their viewers, or amplifying hate speech,” Koo said.
She also believes that users should be mindful of how social media algorithms curate similar content to what they’ve previously interacted with. If users have already engaged with rage bait, it increases their chances of seeing it again and can influence the information they get about topics like politics.
“We are living in a post-truth era where scientific facts can easily get contested and alternative facts gain so much traction these days,” Koo said. “Research evidence shows that for political reasons, there are tools that are manufacturing rage to bring disorder to our society and use this content as political weapons as well.”
With a presidential election just months away and an HBCU graduate on the ticket, Coghill raised concerns over the attention Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has brought to HBCUs and Black Greek organizations.
Harris is an alumna of Howard University (B.A. ‘86) and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
“So now it is on their radar, along with sororities and fraternities, ‘the “Divine Nine’ in particular, and rage bait tweeters are going to target those groups of people, and we have to be very, very smart about what we engage with online because they are trying to get us to come out of character,” Coghill said.
Copy edited by Anijah Franklin
