Rage bait has been named Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2025 because it captures a growing shift in online culture. Platforms no longer compete for curiosity, they compete for emotional activation, and anger has become the most profitable trigger. This post explores how outrage is engineered, how algorithms amplify it, and what this means for digital well being.
Rage bait and the economics of engineered emotions
Rage bait is Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2025, and it is not hard to understand why. The entire online ecosystem has shifted from simply fighting for attention to actively manipulating emotions in order to drive engagement and, ultimately, profit. The platforms figured out long ago that nothing travels faster than anger. Outrage creates reactions, reactions feed algorithms, algorithms reward the most polarising content, and the cycle repeats until the user is exhausted.
The definition from Oxford is straightforward. Rage bait is online content deliberately created to provoke anger, frustration, or disgust, and it exists for one reason, to drive traffic and engagement. It is the logical evolution of the classic internet troll, but wrapped in glossy packaging and amplified by modern recommendation systems that turn emotional disturbance into a business model.
This is not happening in a vacuum. As Oxford noted, 2025 has been dominated by social unrest, debates over online regulation, and a growing awareness of digital well being. The shift is not just linguistic. It reflects a deeper change in how attention itself is treated. In earlier years the main technique was curiosity baiting. The idea was simple, make people click because they are intrigued. Today the goal is to make people click because they are emotionally triggered. Anger is predictable. Outrage is reliable. A provoked mind spends longer on the platform.
It is a very efficient business model, but also a deeply corrosive one.
Oxford’s statement about last year’s Word of the Year is revealing. “Brain rot” described the mental drain of endless scrolling. This year’s rage bait exposes the mechanism behind the drain. Combine both and you get a closed loop. Outrage fuels engagement, algorithms amplify it, and users are left mentally exhausted from constant emotional manipulation.
This is no longer accidental. It is engineered.
The shortlisted alternatives tell their own story. “Aura farming” is about manufacturing a certain kind of charisma online, a curated coolness that has little to do with reality. “Biohack” reflects the obsession with optimising the self, often in ways that are inaccessible to most people. In the end all three terms describe a culture where online presence, physical self improvement, and emotional exploitation have fused into one continuous commercial system.
What makes rage bait stand out is its honesty. It names the mechanism directly. It names the practice the platforms would prefer to hide behind terms like relevance or engagement optimisation.
Yesterday I wrote about how emotions have become a commodity. Rage is no longer just an expression of frustration. It has become a currency. If you manage to provoke enough people, you will be rewarded by algorithms that care only about the volume of interaction, never the quality of the conversation or the well being of the user.
None of this is healthy. It is one of the reasons I take regular breaks from social media. The mind needs space that is not constantly monetised. The brain cannot live in a state of engineered agitation without consequences.
Rage bait deserves Word of the Year because it describes a phenomenon that defines our current digital moment. It names the way online platforms harvest emotions for profit, and it forces us to confront the ethical cost. The internet was once about curiosity. Today it is often about provocation. Recognising this shift is the first step in resisting it.
If platforms profit from anger, then preserving your composure becomes an act of reclaiming the self, a reminder that attention is not a resource to be harvested but a form of autonomy.