Most of us are no longer strangers to TikTok. As much as I express fierce disdain for the app that has at least ruined our attention spans, and at worst, collected our private information and data, I am constantly sucked into a doom scroll at any free moment.
It is an addictive, but also rather disturbed cycle. First, I’m watching innocuous meal prep videos. I swipe, and see “how to lose 20kg in a month”. Swiping past quickly, I watch a street interview so egregiously edited that only women are giving wrong answers to simple geography questions. Annoyed, I finally swipe again for some outlandish take on the latest celebrity gossip.
This feed is no accident, but the work of a sophisticated algorithm to curate specific videos that we may not necessarily enjoy, but that we are likely to engage with. Once they’ve captured our attention, social media platforms monetise it to sell to advertisers. Unfortunately, the easiest way to secure our engagement is by eliciting strong emotions — particularly anger.
Thus, rage-bait is formed — content which is deliberately designed to provoke anger, and therefore engagement. From deliberately inflammatory ‘hot-takes’, out-of-touch celebrities flaunting their wealth, or outright offensive statements, rage-bait content has become a lucrative field where outrage has become the currency of the internet. Influencers like Wista Zesu have crafted careers exclusively around rage-bait content, raking in over £100,000 a year.
So really, when we share, comment, or in any way interact with a video, we are ultimately reinforcing and fuelling the creation of such content by validating the efficacy of this strategy. Undoubtedly, this is morally reprehensible; the darkest and ugliest side of modern-day internet culture no doubt proves dead-internet theory true. But digging deeper, building an incentive system based on what gets the most clicks and reactions, rather than quality content, has far deeper and more sinister implications than we may realise.
Rage-bait has no ethical boundaries, with no limit to how far people will go to generate engagement for the sake of profit. One of the most disturbing examples of this has been the rise of videos that glorify and trivialise eating disorders, with TikTok’s algorithm delivering more dieting, exercise, and toxic eating disorder content to vulnerable viewers through personalised content.
Recently, when my ‘For You’ feed was filled with such toxic videos, marking them as “not interested” — a feature on TikTok meant to allow users direct control over their algorithm — resulted in a slew of similar toxic videos being recommended for the next few days.
Many online have shared similar experiences, where marking a video as “not interested” has resulted in exacerbated exposure to similar content — a prime example of TikTok’s efforts to promote rage-bait content to users. Even with awareness that content is meant to be rage-bait, evidence time and time again shows how “pro-ana” (a harmful Internet colloquialism for pro-anorexia) content can affect mental health, lower self esteem, and even lead to the development of eating disorders.
It isn’t just eating disorders — social media can have terrible implications for many mental health disorders. Psychiatrists point out that negative social comparison plays a role in low self-esteem, depressive disorders, and decreased satisfaction with life. And with rage-bait algorithms, this relationship goes beyond passive. Algorithms can feed off of the fears and thoughts of people with OCD. A recent investigation has shown how Meta’s algorithms fail to remove self-harm content, and even encourage accounts engaging with self-harm content to connect with one another. Engagement with such content is highly-associated with suicide.
Negative social media algorithms aren’t just an individual issue — even if you’ve never felt that rage-bait has personally affected you, they affect the health of our society and the way we communicate. The ultimate goal of social media is to keep you scrolling, and while we all know the importance of taking responsibility for your own health, it’s equally true that we don’t need to normalise an online system which consumes our time and mental energy for the enrichment of a few tech billionaires.
Social media’s business model relies on selling our attention to advertisers. In a recent Ezra Klein podcast episode, he alluded to this paradigm shift within this information age, where attention should not only be viewed as a commodity but the world’s most valuable resource that everyone — influencers, politicians, corporations — is in constant battle to attract. But beyond this, given how much the content we consume can affect our thoughts, beliefs, and actions (consciously or not), our attention ought to be something we protect.
Social media regulation can, and should, happen. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, never wanted it to be a commodity. The internet should be nothing but a space of human connection and the free exchange of information he intended it to be.
While we may be well into 2025, I implore you (and myself) to adopt a new resolution: to guard our attention by exercising healthy skepticism toward viral discourse and resisting the urge to engage with rage-bait. In this day and age, and particularly as TikTok becomes increasingly embroiled in accusations of bias following Trump’s inauguration, reclaiming our attention and controlling the way we internalise and respond to content may be the most radical act of all.
