'Rage-baiting': How content creators are profiting off your anger

Trolling has been around for almost as long as the internet itself; think of the early days of YouTube clickbait titles, edgy memes posted to Facebook, and nihilistic twitter threads, all deliberately designed to provoke and enrage the masses. It's an online terrain most people are familiar with, and yet the rise of TikTok has allowed a new form of trolling to thrive.

Rage-baiting, or rage-farming, has a new wave of content creators and social media influencers not only inciting rage online - but profiting off viewers' anger too.

At its core, rage-baiting is a manipulative tactic used by content creators to elicit outrage from their viewers. The idea is that if you're angry, you're more likely to comment, share, react, and ultimately increase the online engagement of that video, which helps content creators drive more traffic to their channels and earn more revenue.

On TikTok, that often looks like staged interactions and storytimes, disgusting cooking videos, and mistakes that, frankly, just piss people off.

Barista and TikToker Ryan Gawlik is a master at rage-baiting - he does things like intentionally calling espresso "expresso" and biting into a whole KitKat bar, rather than splitting it into four bars, because he knows internet audiences find that kind of behaviour upsetting. It's mostly harmless content that gets people a little riled up, but it's proven lucrative for Gawlik. In late 2022, his follower count tipped over 1 million followers and he started turning views into cash.

But he's not the only one: popular TikTok users can make money through a combination of revenue streams, including sponsorships, fundraising drives, product sales, and by accepting tips. The more their accounts and videos grow, the more opportunities for revenue. But in the rage-baiting sphere of things, users go down some interesting avenues.

In the past few years, gross cooking videos have become a popular trend on the platform - 2021's viral feta pasta, which used an entire block of feta and watery baked tomatoes, was just the start. Now videos of dried pasta popped in blenders to create flour for a mushy dough, or boiled beef and eggs and cheese in a bag of Doritos, for instant nachos, are the norm.

Eli Betchik, better known as @elis_kitchen, is the "most evil chef on TikTok" by his own proclaimation and a great purveyor of this trend. In 2023, Betchik told the Guardian some of her content is engineered to provoke viewers - but she never pretended it wasn't. "I never work to appear genuine ... if anyone asks, I say, 'Yeah, I do this for attention'. I think it's pretty obvious I do."

Blended bologna and blueberry toast, or the much-reviled potato crisp smash - a sandwich made of peas, pineapple, cheese and nuts, with bread coated in mayo and then fried - are among the many outrageous videos eliciting visceral reactions from viewers: messages like "I'm gonna hurl", "This is body horror", "This one made me physically ill" to "I cannot express how upsetting this is" are strewn throughout the comments section.

But while gross food falls under the category of 'obviously inflammatory' content, some of the most successful rage-baiting videos find a more delicate balance between satire and earnest.

Content creators like Nara Smith, who has been accused of rage-baiting for the clearly unrealistic lifestyle she represents, would never admit to rage-baiting, and it's part of why the strategy is so successful.

In her videos, Smith is often dressed in designer clothes, cooking elaborate meals from scratch for her small children; the meals take hours, sometimes days to put together, and it's obvious her kids aren't going that long without eating.

For some, the trolling is evident: "She's clearly trolling and you guys keep falling for it, we love you Nara!!x" one comment says. But for the most part, viewer reactions range from confusion to disbelief to admiration - and the lack of clarification allows Smith to continue her reign. As of August 2024, she's one of TikTok's most searched users, and her videos clock tens of millions of views each day.

Rage-baiting has been criticised as a tactic - it contributes to an already angry online world and weaponises people's emotions into generating revenue. But according to Business Insider, it's a tactic that's proven to work.

"...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 ... 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."

It's true - the more you watch, even if in shock horror - the more your algorithm pushes that kind of content into your feed.

It's a strategy Winta Zesu caught onto quickly. The 22-year-old New York influencer is best known for her skits confronting horrible waiters or rude influencers at press events - but her responses match their behaviour and she can sometimes come across entitled. Her comments section is often divided. With 515,000 devoted followers, she's one of the fastest-growing rage-bait influencers on TikTok. But her content didn't start out this way.

Zesu began posting the controversial videos in 2022, after realising they generated more traffic than fashion and beauty vlogs. It was after her first red carpet event that she posted a video of herself; two girls could be seen whispering in the background, and people in Zesu's comments thought the girls were gossiping about her. She rolled with it, and the rest is history.

Less than two years later, Rolling Stone reported that Zesu was averaging anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 in revenue across all platforms. She told the publication, "I realised that videos really blow up when there's like controversial things going on in the video ... when someone asks me what kind of content I do, I usually say skits, or if I'm talking about those restaurant videos, say satire. I guess it is rage bait, too. But I don't know why I don't say that. I don't really like the term."

It's clear rage-baiting is on the rise - but many TikTokers dispute the idea that they're doing it - indicating that they believe it's ethically wrong.

Lauren, who's known as @the_dadvocate to her 1.3 million followers, told Business Insider she was familiar with the accusation; her videos, which revolve around "partner shaming" men, are contentious, as are her views on other inter-gender issues. But she says "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".

Denise Bradley and Savannah Sparks, the women behind RX0rcist, also shared that their relationship to rage-baiting was complicated, saying anger was a necessary weapon for fighting medical misinformation and racial inequities online.

"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?'" Bradley told Insider.

Sparks added that "reporting on science, misinformation, and crimes isn't rage-baiting ... rage-baiting is deliberate manipulation" - and it's not something either of them do.