pissing people off for fun and profit
rage bait, tiktok, and "satire"
This was initially going to be for a video essay but I died and went to hell. I don't want to re write the entire thing but if you go "this reads kinda weird" it definitley does, partially because script partially because im illiterate. For context videos will be linked.
Rage Bait posts are those designed to provoke a strong negative emotional reaction in the viewer to drive engagement on social media. I think rage bait is sort of obvious in a lot of cases, like insisting on Tiktok that you actually do your makeup by covering your whole face with blush first, or that you've truly decided to go everywhere barefoot to “connect with the earth”.
But do we have to accept that people are going to be making videos like this to drive up engagement, and some people are going to fall for it? Do we blame the creators? the algorithm? Capitalism? We live in a society?
A Brief Primer on Social Media Engagement
Engagement comes in many forms across social media platforms but since we’ll be focusing on Tiktok we have likes, comments, saves, shares, and watch time.
Social media companies want you to stay on their platform and to keep your attention. Tiktok does this with a complex algorithm that uses all of those aforementioned factors to determine what gets shown to you on your For You Page. A single initial video that you watch may hold your attention for a moment but it also then gives that platform some information on what to show you next. Did you like the video? How long did you watch it? If we show you another video by this creator will you watch that one? Let's show a video from someone with a lot of audience overlap with that first creator. Oh you liked that too? Bam, you got algorithm’d. Now they know you’re a Lorde fan who loves the Muppets and there’s no going back now. And yeah I am watching edits of Ms Piggy to “Liability”. I know art when I see it.
On the creator's side; the more engagement you receive on a tiktok, the more the algorithm pushes your video out, increasing visibility and potential for interaction, which could then cause the algorithm to continue pushing your post. And in theory if you can keep that little cycle going for a while you might end up with a viral, or at least pretty popular video.
Engagement typically is gained through creating content that people naturally want to watch and interact with anyway. From saving a funny video to discovering Chappell Roan and watching her blow up in real time as well as those ticket prices you fucked up and didn’t buy back in January. I think about that a lot.
Anyway sometimes people on Tiktok, instagram, or youtube do this well enough and frequently enough that it becomes what they do for a living and that’s how we end up with our full time content creators, influencers, and sometimes celebrities. Hooray!
But if you’re really struggling to have your content picked up by the Tiktok algorithm (or are feeling kind of lazy) how do you get engagement to make money? by pissing people off!
People don’t have to like or enjoy your videos for you to get comments and watch time- you just have to make them mad or confused enough that they feel obligated to tell you that you’re doing something wrong. In the same way that “all press is good press” all engagement is good engagement in the eyes of the TikTok algorithm.
The Current State of Things
At this point we have an abundance of users across TikTok dedicated to creating engagement baiting skits that are garnering up to tens of millions of views at a time. European Kid arguing with your fave in a parking garage, advertising your skincare product by pretending to put it on people non-consensually in public. There’s literally a band doing promo by telling people that their lead singer might be a serial killer.
A major rage bait creator that comes to mind is Winta Zesu (@winta_zesu). In this video with 13 million views and almost half a million likes, Winta is allegedly in some sort of confrontation with a waitress over not receiving a brunch menu. Clearly in this video she is acting intentionally obtuse and rude to wait staff, which, of course, is going to get a lot of engagement in the comments. I meant hate. A lot of hate in the comments.
“You posted this?” “that's so embarrassing” “this can't be real” (wait no hold on i think you’re onto something).
I could understand falling for some of her more popular videos if they just appeared on your For You Page and you didn’t care to look into it. But if you do happen to check her account out; under the playlists there's one titled “Restaurant incidents: 205 parts” and a “General Incidents: 257 parts”. So it's never a one off, this is the kind of content that she is putting out regularly and deliberately.
In an interview Zesu told business insider :
“She started posting videos a bit ‘out of the ordinary’ after some strong reactions to videos she posted from red-carpet events. ‘That's how my first video blew up, people were saying, 'Oh your hair is so not even done for a red carpet, why are you even there? “kind of thing". (Discussing her fake videos) she said "I was not expecting all of this to happen," and "I really didn't think people were going to think it was real”. "I'm just posting whatever people react to, I guess”.
It’s one thing for someone to post fake videos online, this isn’t anything new, but the method in which it's done here is specifically to incite an angry reaction (you know, “rage bait)”. And it’s ironically a bit upsetting to know that people are willing to deliberately rile up their fellow human beings for a little money and attention. And unfortunately people will start fighting over who in the skit is in the right and sometimes commenters respond pointing out the bait, only to be argued with that these videos actually are real. It feels like a sad waste of time to have real humans arguing over whether or not a fake server was rude for calling fake security on a woman who is filming a skit alone on her phone.
If you find a bait post the comment section will usually sort of look the same. Some people are going to be nice and provide a real earnest recommendation to do whatever it is they are doing better. But more often commenters are responding with snarky comments and providing basic information they think the original poster doesn't know.
But I would like to emphasize something: If you’re spending time arguing with people and commenting on these posts; you aren’t winning an argument, you are falling for bait. You and also the person you’re arguing with have gotten baited into wasting your precious time. The poster (even if they are doing something very dumb!) has succeeded and possibly even profited by you interacting in any capacity.
If you are a frequent user of TikTok or reels or whatever, I think it’s good to keep in mind that we are in an attention economy and your time is valuable. It's up to you to determine for yourself what you are willing to tolerate as entertainment.
Trending for attention and profit
Okay, so then you recognize the bait, scroll past the videos and don’t comment. That should be the end of it right? Well no!!! Because on TikTok when something is popular (especially for negative reasons) it will spark trends, responses, and sometimes reignite or start new discourse. The features available on tiktok like stitching or using someone else's audio/song makes memeing anything to hell and back extremely easy.
A pretty low stakes example of rage bait is the aforementioned Blush Girl, whose gimmick is to cover her face with a blush product, blend it out, and then apply the rest of her makeup so that it looks mostly normal. Looking back you can see she wasn’t always applying blush so intensely, but rather focused on her method of mixing Bio Oil with a liquid blush while simultaneously posting about how she wanted large online makeup artists to try her routine out.
Unfortunately this didn’t work to get the trend picked up, so on video 56 of the now 260 videos in the playlist entitled “Blush and face oil” the creator packs on more product over a wider area than we’d seen previously, and the Tik Tok goes viral. 10 million views, 555k likes, and of course, the comments section is filled with the expected “it's giving sunburn!”. (Why doesn’t she just put the blush on top of her foundation? Is she stupid?)
And since her viral video this blush trick makes up the vast majority of her content, trying different colored blushes in large amounts. And of course we wind up with an influx of users trying the “crazy blush hack” to see if it actually works, or sometimes videos of people just putting on excessive blush and kind of alluding to teasing the original poster.
Actually, really quick, vague posting seems to be an entire subgenre of Tik tok. Very often I see videos of someone with just a white text overlay on the screen that says “This girl made me sooo mad” with no other information anywhere and somehow they’re referencing the third most liked post of the sound that they’re using. And then all of the comments are either agreeing or frustrated and trying to figure out what they're even referring to. I don't get it. I can only imagine they’re providing no context just for the comments and watch time while people search for answers. Literally worse than the guys who just point at memes. At least they're showing me something!
When it’s something like blush application the stakes are pretty low and the discourse can only go so far. However this is not always the case with content designed to cause conflict and controversy.
Mama Bri
A Tiktokker in the relationship rage bait genre, specifically in the I-hate-my-husband-and-im-cooking-dinner niche is Mama Bri (@themamabrianna). Her first video to go tik tok viral (5M views, 20k comments) is “nachos with a twist”, where she is making nachos and the white text overlay explains that her husband didn't eat the dinner she cooked so she's making him nachos and if she doesn't feed him he won't eat. The comments absolutely roast her husband and their relationship, and Today even published an article on it! “Wife makes nachos for ‘picky’ husband who refused dinner, sparking heated debate”:
“I had a feeling that the video would ruffle some feathers, but I did not expect it to blow up like it did,” Greenfield tells TODAY, adding that she often films snippets of her daily life to share on social media. “Anddddd sometimes I put sarcastic captions or exaggerate the story just for fun; it’s always interesting to see how people react to these 60-90 second videos, positive or negative,”“My husband and I are genuinely entertained by the whole thing at this point. Some of the rude comments are hilariously clever!”
“Thankfully, we have an excellent sense of humor and know the truth (that my husband is a wonderful husband and even better father) and don’t need validation from TikTok comments, but phew,” “I just want people to remember that there is always a person behind the video, and that the person can read what you’re commenting!”.
Okay cool well it’s good to know they’re happy at least and that this is just some light hearted rage bait, sorry they said all of that about your husbands hairline. Onto the next.
In a video with 2.5 million views Bri says her husband didn't remember their wedding anniversary and blames her because she didn’t put it on the calendar, he forgot his son's date of birth at the doctor, etc. And now she's going to start leaving off his golf outings and Xbox release dates. Almost every comment is calling for a divorce and Bri liked a comment that said “Following and interacting with her posts so she can make that TikTok money and divorce his ass”. And then even replied with “You’re the real MVP”. If you’ve just seen a couple of her videos and don’t have the context of that one article, it can really look like she’s a woman in a sort of bad relationship.
In the next big video with 10 million views she’s counting the days since her husband last complimented her and is attempting to recreate the hairstyle of that day. The comments section is full of people saying that they’re never getting married now, but with some scrolling there are a few sprinkled in calling it “sarcasm” or “satire” that the creator has liked (thumbs up!). So I think we now have hopefully moved from “sarcastic and exaggerated stories" to maybe skits and what these guys are calling “satire”.
And finally in a video with 9 million views she is cleaning the floor with the overlaying text explaining that she has 250 dollars pulled out of her husband's bank account every month for a cleaner to deep clean the house. She says that she had asked her husband for a cleaner when she was pregnant, throwing up and also caring for their one year old but was told it wasn’t in the budget. She explains that now they have had a cleaner for a year, however it has actually been her cleaning and pocketing the $250 in cash every month. She then says she’ll have to herself a new expensive hobby (since her husband has those, #golfwife) and at the very end she includes a blurb in small text stating “If you feel the need to hide money from your partner in order to plan your escape, check the resource in my bio”.
I’m not entirely sure how to read this video.
When her TikToks don't perform as well, the joke is obvious or the content is more mundane, like recipe tutorials or making slime with her kid. This is very similar to her early videos, when she was making more lighthearted mommy vlogs. However, during this period Bri posted a video about how she missed her flight, which ended up with almost half a million views and a lot of hate comments.
This is clearly speculation- but assuming she now understands that rage gets views, we can assume it's a pretty easy jump to just apply that to the videos you already regularly make at home. Because within a couple weeks of posting she's insinuating that she's drugging her husband with melatonin to get some self care time in.
In a more recent video (with only 11 thousand views) she mentions how TikTok is her second job now and she’s going to keep posting regular content alongside “exaggerated stories about her ‘POS’ husband”. I understand that TikTok is Bri’s job and that she might need that additional income to support her family; however by putting herself in some of these ambiguously real “exaggerated stories” or vaguely “satirical pieces” she seems to be profiting off of the idea of being in a really bad, or potentially abusive relationship. Or at least using those associated concepts and experiences to craft bait content.
The comments on her video giving this “money tip” unfortunately help to demonstrate how this piece was still crafted for engagement. Some viewers who didn't read the end blurb are angry at her for lying or “stealing” her husband's money with others replying to argue, commenting for everyone to “watch till the end!” or they won't understand. Which conveniently increases the video's watch time (algorithm yay).
But most of the commenters are providing extra tips, sympathetic, confused, recommending hobbies, or applauding the creator for sharing the information. One commenter is still confused but attempts to clarify the videos intent: “to make sure i've got this right, she's safe, she just wants an expensive hobby but this could be a good idea for people that need to get out?” and the creator affirms this by liking it and responding “winner winner”. She does this on a few posts- where no one gets what’s happening so eventually after some mental gymnastics someone gets a “winner winner” comment. If your post necessitates replying to the one person that seems to get what’s going on, maybe you aren’t conveying what you’re attempting to convey- almost at all.
I don't want to say that she isn’t trying to do something by linking the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence in her bio (actually it’s in her linktree, in her bio just says “its not that deep”) but this feels like a very weird, profitable, confusing, and contentious way to spread awareness around such a sensitive topic. But also I don’t think it's spreading awareness if no ones even aware of what's happening.
When you’re obfuscating or blurring the lines of reality it could even make it harder for victims to relate to or identify actual abusive scenarios if they’re seeing these unrealistic sorts of depictions that are being defended as a way to “raise awareness”. Also this “tip” seems like it could be particularly dangerous for someone in an abusive relationship if they were found out at any point, which is very concerning.
It just feels very disingenuous to make a video to apparently support victims of abuse while in your other videos you post skits about your husband lowering your allowance, not helping with the kids, making you do all of the housework, not complimenting you in 76 days, maybe cheating on you, and not sleeping in the same bed for months. All the while never really trying to clarify or indicate to the wider audience your actual intent by making the “joke” obvious, by including it in the caption, or even putting it in the tags.
A lot of TikTok commenters and some creators, including Bri, seem to have a really bad habit of calling any controversial skit video “satire”. You can get away with almost anything on TikTok by calling it satire. And you don't even actually have to call it that yourself. You just have to have someone in the comments call it satire and then like their comment.
Satire
You could say I don’t get the jokes but. Where are the jokes? If it’s satire like the comments and the poster claim then what is this satirizing?
If satire is (by definition (sorry we have to!)): “the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues”
If any of this were to be an effective satire on the imbalance of emotional and physical labor of household work in cisgender heterosexual marriages then a point would have to come across, we would get the joke and understand that something was being critiqued. But because this isn't satire (or isn't effective satire) there is no deeper point. And if there is critique to be made (and there always is) it’s being pointed out by the commenters rather than through the actual video; because over everything this content functions as bait. And if there is a joke it really just seems like it would have to be sort of mocking or making fun of the women who remain in these kinds of relationships and situations.
Poe’s Law
There's this thing called Poe’s Law which according to Wikipedia “is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views”. This internet law originated on an early Christian internet forum where users were debating about creationism. Someone made a joke, another user replied “Good thing you included the winky. otherwise people might think you are serious”, and Nathan Poe responded “POE'S LAW: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article”. And so Poe’s law is born- that online, particularly through text, without an indication that a joke is being made it can be fairly assumed that someone could take any given post seriously.
Applying this to Bri’s content, without a clear indicator of intent, some viewers are going to mistake these “exaggerated stories” or skits for truth and feel genuine concern for Bri or rage towards her husband and marriage. And when some commenters realize that the videos aren’t real or are rage bait they’re understandably upset, because if it's not real the joke doesn't make sense because it isn’t really funny.
Even in her video that seems to admit that these videos are fake (a TikTok captioned “my PR team when I show them my next terrible husband video” in which her husband is the “PR team”) she's still liking comments that say “or maybe she got yelled at for posting it and doesn't want him mad at her so she pretends it's all jokes” and replying to “so that was staged?” with “not staged, but dramatized for sure”. While also in the same comments section replying to someone saying “I wouldn’t want my wife to publically portray me in such a way that people have to research to find out it's not the truth” with her responding “good thing i’m not your wife then”. It comes across like she's trying to keep up act while also defending herself and her husband in a way that lets her keep posting the same content.
But the other major part of Poe’s law is its application in the context of extreme views.
In the original forum thread the topic was creationism. But in a 2017 article from Wired , writer Emma Grey Ellis helps to connect how Poe’s Law has become applicable in right-wing internet culture.
If you recall, a while ago there was quite a bit of discourse over the “okay” symbol that originated because of 4chan. Users made posts in which they tried to correlate the OK hand gesture with white supremacy and spread them on social media to start, you know, a big hoax to “troll the libs”. So when right-wing media personalities Cassandra Fairbanks and Mike Cernovich posed at the white house doing the “okay” gesture and Fusion reporter Emma Roller quote tweeted the image with “Just two people doing a white power hand gesture in the white house” she got sued by one of them for defamation.
Emma Roller had unfortunately fallen for the bait that had been created and circulated by 4chan and then perpetuated by Fairbanks and Cernovich in their photo. And because this manufactured hate symbol was created to be ambiguous, when Roller called out the photo it was very easy for Fairbanks to go “what no we didn't know about that, she's just trying to ruin my career!”. But unfortunately for her Fairbanks had also tweeted “They’ve become so easy to troll that you don’t even have to make an effort anymore, ” and responded with a winky tongue out emoji to a response that said “Please tell me you guys made the OK sign to troll off this fantastic lefty hysteria”.
So, if you were wondering, rage baiting doesn’t hold up in court because the judge found “that Ms. Fairbanks intended her photo and hand gesture to provoke, or troll, people like Ms. Roller”. “Whether because the gesture was actually offensive or because they would think that it was offensive - not that Ms. Fairbanks was the victim of a malicious attack based on innocent actions. So Ms. Fairbanks has failed to state a claim and her case should be dismissed".
Also one of Fairbanks reasons why Roller would intentionally smear her career is because Roller is a “gatekeeper journalist” against Fairbanks, a self professed “Grassroots Journalist”. So I don't know, I guess you can’t use gatekeeping as a legal argument either. God it’s like the internet isn’t real life or something.
Through the connections made in her article, Ellis has helped to articulate an aspect of Poe’s Law that applies seemingly more and more today. That an individual will post something extreme online and when that content inevitably receives backlash they can claim that it had been irony or satire all along, like a get out of jail free card.
The Discourse
I don’t think there’s any good to making rage bait, especially around sensitive topics; and I don’t think there’s any good done engaging with it beyond calling it out for what it is. In addition to the comments on the actual TikToks, there are a lot of reaction videos responding to various rage bait content taking it entirely at face value. I’d bet some creators reacting know that it's rage bait but continue posting for engagement on their own accounts. This is one example of how rage bait can add a layer of frustration and debate that complicates actual issues.
When I started writing this the Youthforia foundation scandal was at its height. For those unaware- the makeup brand Youthforia (seemingly half heartedly) attempted to be more inclusive in their shade range for darker skin tones, resulting in the release of a foundation shade that has since been compared to black face paint. The company itself was unable to even find a model that this shade matched, as no one’s skin tone is hex code #000000.
During this time a non black rage bait creator Kevin Leonardo tried on the foundation for a “review”, effectively doing blackface, while simultaneously trying to frame it as doing some sort of good deed for the community.
What Kevin posted is for obvious reasons using racism and blackface to gain money and attention. But addition to doing this he’s taken attention away from the real problem. That black makeup users struggle to find brands with shade ranges that encompass their skin tones and when they ask a brand for foundation shades for everyone they receive a foundation shade made for no one and are then expected to be grateful they got anything. What the fuck does that have to do with you Kevin Leonardo!
Stop doing it please
So, I have a couple of questions. Why did this happen, and how did we get here?
I think obviously a lot of the fault falls on the creators, they found a method that works with the algorithm and kept going no matter the damage because that’s what's going to do numbers and make them money on social media. But to try and answer more of "How”- I have to consider that content on TikTok evolves very quickly. For instance, everyone knows that POV means this (first person pov) but on TikTok it looks like this (third person pov ie. facing camera) and seems to serve as more of a signal that ‘this is a skit’ than an indicator of your actual frame of view. And at some point because it's not really a (first person) POV and everyone knows it's just a skit the POV gets dropped off and you’re left with the plain text of the scenario.
I would venture to guess that some combination between this sort of TikTok-skit-culture and rage bait has produced people like Mama Bri -and as I was finishing this essay someone named Mama Owl who is a skit TikTokker with over a million followers who is now in some hot water on the platform for creating POVs with some very… sensitive scenarios.
I think this is also in a major way the fault of Tiktok, their algorithm, and how we interact with it.
A study in 2021 looked into the metrics from 25 popular Instagram accounts in order to determine which kinds of posts were garnering the most engagement. The authors determined that posts that were expected to trigger a negative emotional reaction received more engagement than both posts that would elicit positive and neutral emotions. They attribute this to our negativity bias which “refers to our proclivity to “attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information” (Varish, Grossman, and Woodward 2008).
By creating posts that elicit negative emotions to gain more engagement on TikTok, with the algorithm subsequently pushing those videos due to the increased interaction, both the creators and the platform seem to take advantage of your regular developmental psychosocial response for profit. They’ve designed a system that's bound to promote and capitalize on conflict, controversy, and misinformation while also failing to properly regulate it for its very large, very young user base. Even allowing some of these accounts to be monetized and their videos to still be pushed so heavily is wild to me (looking at you Kevin).
Here is a fun feature you might feel like using if you didn’t know about it before. On TikTok when you find a video you don't like you can hold down on the screen and press the “not interested” button which then lets you block a creator or the sound from your for you page. A less harsh personal penalty you can enforce is simply scrolling when you recognize bait, providing zero engagement for the creator and also saving yourself some peace of mind. I am personally very excited for when I get to delete all of the clips I saved writing this and hopefully never have to see these guys again.
I don't think you (ie. people) don’t have to stop using TikTok, you just have to stop watching and commenting on videos that are trying to make you mad. And I guess some might argue “no actually do stop using TikTok” but I see a lot of value in short form content and platforms that can allow it to be successful.
Short videos are not only good for getting bite sized information across, like Jessica Burbank a newscaster who does the “biggest news of the week translated for gen z” or Mercury Stardust “the trans handy ma’am” where she shares tips on maintenance for renters and explains to you why your toilet has an S curve (shes fucking great). But also there’s so much insightful cultural commentary from creators like (Substack icon) Rayne Fisher-Quann, and (personal style icon) Chloe Forero (sometimes).
I know they say “social media is fake'' but when I hear that I think about people using facetune, comparing themselves to models on instagram, and whatever the moral of the story is (and that's still really important) but allll social media is fake.
Similar to clickbait, when you know about rage bait it makes it harder to fall for and much easier to notice and ignore. dont be dumb.