Hook, Line, and Sinker: How Rage Bait is Ruining Your Life

Nara is the baddest of them all…$$$$

Nothing helps me unwind after a long day of click-clacking on my keyboard like shifting from my big screen to my small screen to consume more content. I’ll pour myself a fat glass of wine, even though I’ve told my friends I’m doing a dry January.

By mid-month, I’d downgraded it to a ‘misty’ January, and now, honestly, I’ve completely given up.

Anyway, there’s this woman on the internet I absolutely adore: Elaine (@elainecarolskitchen). She’s an artist specializing in some of the most outrageous and borderline edible food content I’ve ever seen. In one of her more viral creations, she starts by dumping a tub of cheese balls into a crockpot alongside a large block of monterey jack cheese. Then she tosses in some random ingredients, lets it all melt down into a cheese sauce, and dumps it onto a tray of macaroni noodles to create what can only be described as a morally bankrupt version of mac and cheese. She takes a bite. “You’ve gotta try it!” her voiceover shrieks.

Her mind amazes me.

The comments range from “First bite feels like heaven, second takes you there...” to “America has finally found an alternative to firearms….🇺🇸.”

Naturally, I sent this clip to my sister, and received an immediate response of, “Allyson, what the fuck.”

Elaine’s content lives at the mild end of the rage bait spectrum. It’s goofy. It’s obvious. She pulls in millions of views and claims thousands of victims. “I hate this, I hate what you just did, I hate you, and I hate myself for watching.”

Rage bait, which is defined as intentionally controversial content produced solely for engagement, occupies a larger piece of the internet pie each day. It’s not a new idea. Purposely creating problematic content to incite discourse has been a core media strategy since the early 2000s. Rage bait’s sibling, clickbait, was and still is the foundation for several leading media publications like Buzzfeed, People, and Yahoo!. Emotional manipulation for the sake of engagement—and ultimately profit—is now the backbone of American media. And today’s social media algorithms amplify this by design, making you and me victims of their tactics daily. 

Netflix’s corny 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma explores this. While the documentary features an over-the-top dramatization of a suburban teenager (Skyler Gisondo) slowly becoming a right-wing incel thanks to social media targeting, it does share some true insight into the ways social media platforms are designed to manipulate their users by feeding them provocative content in order to keep them scrolling. Five years later, I fear that as cringe as I found the film to be, it was actually a tame analysis of the true nature of social media’s eventual trajectory, having aired only four months before the January 6th Insurrection.

Peanut butter baby

In 2025, social media is overrun with rage bait. It’s a mother and daughter duo who post a scathing review of a popular Los Angeles restaurant, eating their food after it’s been sitting out for six hours. It’s three balding dudes on a podcast talking about how unattractive lip filler makes girls look. It’s a random girl sharing a story of why she rejected her boyfriend’s proposal at an Eras Tour concert because she didn’t like the city she was proposed to in. Random girl is Louisa Melcher and she has over 700 thousand followers on TikTok because she just labels rage bait as satire and you guys fall for that shit on repeat. Rage bait is just as profitable for social media influencers as it is for traditional media. And it’s no surprise that it consumes our feeds when platforms incentivize creators to do just about anything to make a few bucks. Or thousands in Louisa’s case. 

I don’t know how we got here. 

Actually, that’s a lie—I do know. Early in the 2016 U.S. election cycle, conservatives on Trump’s team shifted their strategy. Instead of focusing on his accomplishments as a businessman, they had him do and say just about anything to grab a headline. (See: Get Me Roger Stone.) And, obviously, it worked. American mainstream media rewarded Trump with tens of millions of dollars in free airtime. And over time, rage farming evolved from a tawdry right-wing political tactic into a dominant media strategy that set the stage for everything to come. 

Media on both sides of the aisle learned quickly that there is no better emotion to engage than rage.

And boy are we angry. We’re angry that our jobs that we click-clack at don’t pay us enough. We’re angry that student loan debt was not and will never be forgiven. We’re angry that we can’t get sick in this country without having to dip into our life savings, or even bankrupting ourselves. And then we pick up our phones and get angry watching a girl wipe off her bridal makeup just to redo it herself—only for it to look exactly the same.

When you, like me, unwind with a glass of wine during dry January and think to yourself, ‘God, I’m so exhausted,’ do you ever think about why?

I think maybe we stop taking the bait.