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I’m taking a class on the Beatles this semester, which means that my Instagram feed has been struck with Beatlemania, a few decades too late. What I see the most are videos featuring song or album rankings. I open the comment section and inevitably there’s the comment: “this has to be rage bait.” Admittedly, it can be hard to tell if a stranger on the internet really thinks “Magical Mystery Tour” is better than “Abbey Road,” or if they just want to be contrary.
Rage bait was the Oxford Word of the Year in 2025. Oxford defines it as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage…typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.” Angele Cristin, an associate professor of communication at Stanford University, called it the “negative, vengeful cousin of clickbait.”
Both of those definitions highlight something important about rage bait: social media influencers and content creators are not creating rage bait content for no reason. An absurd comment made without...