(2023-11-04) Have you ever faced with rage-farming_R1

On TikTok, creators farm rage to get clicks and make money. But it can be a fast race to the bottom.

• 'Rage-baiting' has been an effective way to grow engagement since the days of pundit cable news.

• On TikTok, creators say it's been on a steady rise because it's the most effective way to go viral.

• Creators feel pressure to rage-bait to get ahead, but it creates hostility online.

 

For about a year, barista and TikToker Ryan Gawlik has been intentionally pissing people off with his coffee content.

 

In TikTok videos, Gawlik will wrongly call espresso "expresso," or mercilessly bite into a whole KitKat bar because he knows it will incense an internet that finds this kind of behavior viscerally upsetting.

 

It's been mostly harmless—but it's also become a kind of proven growth hack to sustain his career. Since he started posting incendiary content—posts intended to get people a little riled up, or ignite in-fighting in the comments, engagement has increased fivefold, he told Insider. He's also gained more than 350,000 followers (he currently has 1.2 million). And he can feel a bit more secure about a career on social media.

 

Gawlik is among a growing number of creators on TikTok who incite rage, both low stakes and high, to get views. Some call it rage-farming or rage-baiting — whatever the name, it's been used since the early days of social platforms to keep users clicking. Social media anthropologists say it's a tried-and-true technique to grow followers in an attention-based economy where generating engagement, positive or negative, is lucrative digital currency.

 

But the quiet wrestling match for follower engagement has only grown more contentious in recent months. Insider spoke with seven creators who are a part of TikTok's new revenue-sharing program Pulse, which rewards "the top 4%" of all qualifying videos with half the revenue generated from in-feed ad placements. All seven said they've noticed more rage-baiting on their timelines than ever before. With low payouts from TikTok's Creator Fund, a looming recession, and struggling to sustain growth, creators are amping up rage-baiting to get more eyeballs on their content. It's become, as one creator put it, "a race to the bottom."

 

For TikTokers, clicks are currency, and it doesn't matter how they get them.

For as long as cable news punditry has been around, people have weaponized anger to captivate audiences. Social media allowed that anger to become a boundless and flourishing force that's wormed its way into nearly every aspect of our lives. We're mad…about everything…all the time.

 

As writer Molly Jong-Fast noted in The Atlantic earlier this year, "Rage farming is the product of a perfect storm of fuckery, an unholy mélange of algorithms and anxiety." Social media platforms don't care if the message is uplifting or toxic. As long as people are interacting with it, platforms will spread it even further.

 

The creators Insider spoke with called out far-right political provocateurs and commentators Ben Shapiro, Brett Cooper, a conservative talking head for The Daily Wire with her own TikTok channel, and @the_dadvocate, an account run by a woman who advocates for men's rights, as rage-baiters.

 

But they also referred to several progressive-minded Tiktokers as rage-baiters, including Aunt Karen, who's dedicated her account to calling out and identifying racist behavior, and RX0rcist, a professional pharmacist who calls out users who she believes are sharing unsound medical advice.

 

While many of these creators have built flourishing social media careers fanning fury on social injustices or wokeness (each holding a million or several million followers), not everyone is willing to admit that it's an effective growth strategy.

 

Most of the named creators disputed the idea that they rage-farm. Shapiro told Insider he wasn't familiar with the term or the practice.

 

"I only post material I believe," he said in an email statement. "If people are angered by it, that's their prerogative."

 

Lauren, who's known as @the_dadvocate to her 1.3 million followers, doesn't believe she rage-farms in her TikToks because she says she sincerely stands by every point she makes.

 

"No, I do not rage-bait, but I'm familiar with the accusation," she told Insider. "For the accusation to be true, it relies on the creator to be disingenuous and to not actually believe in the things they talk about, and I do."

 

Lauren added that her videos — some of which include pointing out "partner shaming" against men and the high standards men are held to — are meant to make people uncomfortable. But she thinks taking pointed positions on contentious inter-gender issues is bringing people together, not further dividing them.

 

"I get messages all the time from men telling me I inspire them to be better partners to their wives, from wives telling me I'm helping them understand their husbands," she said. "There are far more factors to my motivation than just making people mad and making myself money."

 

For Aunt Karen, whose real name is Denise Bradley, and Savannah Sparks, the woman behind RX0rcist, their relationship to rage-farming is more complicated. They both unequivocally deny doing it, but also say that anger is a necessary weapon for fighting medical misinformation and racial inequities online.

 

"Many people believe that my content is rage-baiting simply because they're uncomfortable with the reality Black people and other people of color face in this world," Bradley told Insider. "I believe in order to push for change, we must see the world as it is. I don't believe in sugarcoating issues … so if people feel that I'm rage-baiting, you should ask yourself: 'what is she trying to get us to see?'"

 

Sparks told Insider that she doesn't see her impassioned reactions to misinformation and shoddy science as rage-baiting. Moreover, if it is, so what? She's trying to do right in this world, she believes.

 

"Reporting on science, misinformation, and crimes isn't rage-baiting …  Rage-baiting is deliberate manipulation," she said. "I tell the truth and, as [fellow TikToker] Drew Afualo eloquently put it, I never said I was nice."

 

Anger permeates faster, and more powerfully, on social media. And that's backed by data.

Conservative commentator Brett Cooper posts a TikTok about why she's a Republican TikTok / @brettcooper_

 

His test has been backed by research. Researchers from Beihang University in China in 2013 found that Weibo users shared disgust and righteous indignation more often than content that elicited emotions like joy and sadness.

 

Experts told Insider that creators are incentivized to play into these emotional apparatuses because it's what the public and big social media tech companies want. 

 

"The goal of social media platforms is to keep people engaged for as long as possible," Yotam Ophir, a professor at the University of Buffalo who studies misinformation and extremism, said. "Ironically enough, it doesn't really matter if this attention is positive or negative ... it doesn't matter to them if we enjoy the video or we get angry at it, as long as we're staying, listening, commenting, and sharing it with our friends."

 

It's also why algorithms on TikTok and YouTube may feed you conservative-leaning videos even if you've engaged more with left-leaning ones. It benefits the platforms to give you what you want and what you don't want.

 

Ophir believes it's a fair practice if creators are harnessing rage or manipulating engagement in small ways to keep up with the online economy. He pointed to the phrase "if you disagree with me, let me know in the comments," as a benign and common way that creators do this every day.

 

Where we need to be more conscientious about creators doing this is when it starts to seed conspiracy and extremism.

 

"If you think of online provocateurs, like Ben Shapiro, when he writes something offensive on Twitter, he knows that he's going to get engagement from his supporters, but also from people who resist him. Some of them will retweet him to criticize them, some of them will go into the comment section to fight back," Ophir said.

 

"It's often the case that the most provocative, emotional, outrageous, sensational stuff is what keeps us engaged. That's just a sad reality. Often, that kind of stuff that keeps us engaged is also racist and hateful and misinformed and conspiratorial in nature."

 

 

 

# What is an issue?

- Have you ever faced rage-farming when using social media?

- If yes, how did you deal with this rage-farming?

- Do you really believe that people using rage-farming don’t think it’s rage-farming as the interviewees in the article says?

- What are the side effects of rage-farming?

- Will this situation be worse or not?

- How should social media react against this rage-farming?

(2023-11-04) Have you ever faced with rage-farming_R1.docx

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