Recently, I read a post on social media which as per me was obnoxiously outrageous. I typed a very long reply, fuming with the absurdity with which the post declared truths which according to me were blatant lies. I had almost pressed enter, when I paused. By chance I opened the replies that had been posted by others, and I was taken aback by what I read. Every reply was fuelled with anger, irrespective of whose side they were debating for. Both sides were fighting tooth and nail.
I reread the post at a slower pace this time. I laughed out loud (LOL if you will) as I saw it for what it was. It was Rage Bait*, the word I had read a few days ago. It was meant to create that reaction. It was doing its job in an excellent manner. I was no longer angry. Instead, I smiled at my own folly, and at the folly of everyone else who had indulged and taken the bait. In this blog I am trying to explore the Story of Rage Bait, the story that points towards a messed up reality that is being staged to provoke anger from us. How does it work? What does it do to us? And why is it important to stop reacting and not fall for it?
We have to accept that we are increasingly being targeted as a clickbait victim society. Why? Because our attention is the most valuable currency in the world today. Rage is the cheapest way to extract it.
Every social media creator, election campaigner, corporate big house…..the list is endless, the desire identical: they want our time, and they want us to pick a side. Can we even give the same attention to everyone? Not feasible. So they do the next best thing. They create content that grabs us by the collar: something negative, controversial, divisive or poisonous. They just post and enjoy the show. You & I do the fighting for them. Let’s be honest, we fight like cats & dogs.
I am reminded of a modern parable ‘Who Shook the Jar’, which was making rounds on social media a while ago. It highlights how people mistakenly fight each other when their problems are fabricated by outside forces.
The parable goes like this: If you place 100 red ants and 100 black ants in a glass jar, nothing happens; they coexist peacefully. However, if you vigorously shake the jar, the ants suddenly start attacking one another. The red ants assume the black ants are their enemies, and the black ants assume the red ants are their enemies. In reality, they are both destroying each other over a crisis created by the person who shook the jar.
I saw the ant story play out in the West Bengal state election recently. The IT cells churned out content by the minute. By the end of it, neighbours who had shared sweets across balconies for years were seeing each other as votes, not people. The jar was being shaken from every direction, and we, the ants, were doing the biting. After the votes were counted, the violence began. Houses burnt. Both sides produced videos of their own dead, to fuel the next round. It was meant to be just another state election, but it turned out to be something else. It was rage bait, running for chief minister. The story is on repeat, every five years.
This isn’t just Bengal. The same story plays out across the globe. Israel-Palestine. Democrats vs Republicans. The wars are real. The disagreements are real. But what reaches us is something else. The machine telling us who to hate this week. Rage bait at a global scale. The jar just keeps getting bigger.
It’s easy to control a confused society,
It’s easier to control a polarised society,
It’s easiest to control a hysterical society.Rage Bait excels in all three. It gives the immediate desired result.
The question I had been asking myself: why do we indulge? The answer lies in our biochemistry. We are inherently designed in a way that our hormones run us. Humans basically are emotional beings. Social media exploits exactly that. After all, algorithms know us more than we know ourselves.
Another question that has been bothering me: Why is it that negative posts attract more traction? Why do lies travel faster than truth? Why is misinformation accepted without fact-checking? Why are we lured to be enraged and participate? Well, humans by nature are gossip mongers. We always have been! Adding to that, anger anyway spreads faster than any other emotion because of two things:
a) Human attention has evolved to prioritise threats. (Here, the threat isn’t physical, it’s psychological. Our beliefs, our core values feel threatened and that’s why we react so strongly.)
b) The moment we become angry, our rational mind switches off. And the algorithm has learned to feed that wiring.
Do we realise what’s happening? Well, I have a story for this very moment. It’s not a new one. All of us have read it, but hardly any of us has absorbed the lesson. The story goes like this: Six blind men in a dark room, each touching different parts of an elephant.
One feels the leg and declares, “Ah! The elephant is like a pillar”.
The other one feels the trunk, for him the elephant becomes a giant snake.
The third one touches the ear and says, “You all are wrong, the elephant is like a fan.”
The man holding the elephant’s tail believes it to be a rope.
None of them is lying. None of them is right.
Rage bait works the same way. The algorithm isolates each of us with a true-feeling fragment of a larger thing and lets us believe a version of it. Polarisation is not a disagreement about facts. It is a disagreement about which part of the elephant we have each been allowed to touch.
Rage Bait makes us ask the hardest question: whose story are we enacting?
The only way out (as per me) is small and unglamorous. We cannot beat technology. We can only abandon it, one moment at a time, by being aware and refusing to participate. Learn to leave the comment unwritten. The pause before we press enter is the only defence we have.
| *Oxford named ‘rage bait’ its Word of the Year for 2025, defining it as online content deliberately designed to provoke anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, usually posted to drive traffic or engagement to a web page or social media account. Its usage tripled over the year. Fittingly, the term was first used back in 2002 to describe a driver who brakes to provoke the car behind him. |
PS: The blog is part of the Story Series. Here are the other essays in the series:
Unleashing Stories: A Year of Narrative Exploration
The Story of Awe & Wonder
Leave a Reply