B'chasdei Hashem, over the past almost 20 years, Beis Mevakesh Lev has produced over 13,300 audio shiurim and over 31,000 written posts, unmatched by any one-person website - all completely free of charge. There are no paywalls or anything else. Now we are turning to you for help so we can continue - any amount will help. Even 99 cents! Thank you to my sweetest and most beloved friends!!!:-)!!
alchehrm@gmail.com
“Rage bait” becoming Oxford’s Word of the Year 2025 offers a psychological X-ray of (the anglophone parts of) society today. Defined as online content “deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage,” engineered to drive traffic and engagement, rage bait had two challengers: aura farming and biohack. The choice landed at a moment when AI is accelerating the production, timing, and emotional precision of such content, turning outrage into a scalable commodity.
Its logic is simple: If content makes you angry, you spend longer with it, share it more often, and return to the platform more quickly. As lexicographers noted in their announcement, rage bait dominated public conversation because it captures a shift in how emotional manipulation has been woven into the fabric of digital communication. Respectively and combined, the competing trio of 2025 terms reflects our conversations and preoccupations over the past year—especially if we look at its relationship with last year’s choice.
Whereas the 2024 selection, brain rot, captured the cognitive drain of doomscrolling, rage bait puts a spotlight on content that is intentionally produced and positioned to spark outrage and drive clicks. Together, they form a painful cycle in which outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and 24/7 exposure leaves us mentally exhausted.
Making this sad trend even more worrisome is its ascension as our journey amid generative AI is taking us beyond experimentation to integration, which is one step closer to reliance, and only a short distance away from full-blown addiction. Agency decay is becoming a hybrid reality before our eyes, forming the backdrop against which rage bait plays out. Digital platforms are reshaping our thinking and behaviour.
A Match Made in Digital Heaven
Another rising term that is interesting to consider in this context is AI slop, which describes the inundation of digital spaces with a flood of low-quality AI-generated material that fills our feeds.
The combination of these words is telling: One reflects overproduction (AI slop), the other overreaction (rage bait), but both fall on fertile ground as our most precious natural resource is withering (brain rot) and with it our ability and appetite for autonomous action (agency decay). Together, these terms describe a mind stretched thin by synthetic abundance.
We already know what this produces. A large-scale audit of Twitter/X’s algorithmic feed demonstrated that engagement-based ranking systematically boosts posts with moral-emotional language and out-group hostility — even though users reported they did not want more of it. That pattern is reinforced by earlier revelations from inside Meta, where internal documents showed that posts triggering “anger” reactions were at one point ranked more strongly by Facebook’s algorithm than ordinary likes.
When AI is trained on engagement data, it learns a blunt rule: If it angers you, amplify it.
Curated Polarization Becomes Feature
Rage bait is harmful and efficient. It leverages psychological shortcuts: Anger sharpens group boundaries, simplifies complexity, and rewards quick moral judgment.
Falsehoods containing moral-emotional words spread more rapidly because human attention naturally privileges threat and outrage. Recommendation systems exploit this vulnerability deliberately. Multiple investigations into TikTok’s algorithm, for example, found that accounts expressing mild interest in political or identity-based topics were quickly funneled into more extreme or polarizing streams of content.
No one designs these systems with the explicit goal of radicalization. But once “engagement” becomes the metric, polarization becomes the emergent property.
Everyday Rage Bait You Already Know
You have likely encountered rage bait (at least once) today. Consider:
A video claiming teachers are “forced” to adopt a shocking new rule — which turns out to be a mundane district update.
A selectively edited clip of a politician made to appear hateful or incompetent.
A carousel post falsely portraying a celebrity as cruel, boosted by AI-generated comments that simulate indignation.
Behind these posts, AI might have generated the narration, the imagery, the first round of comments, or even the fabricated screenshots offered as “proof.”
The harm is physiological: Repeated micro-doses of anger elevate baseline stress, shorten attention spans, and erode trust. The brain becomes trained to anticipate outrage, much like a muscle conditioned for reflex rather than reflection.
What Oxford’s Choice Reveals About Us
“Rage bait” is about more than AI-powered platforms. It is about people navigating AI-shaped environments. The term suggests we are:
Aspirationally conflicted: We say we want healthier discourse, yet our clicks reward the opposite.
Emotionally hijacked: Our nervous systems evolved for village-sized social worlds, not a global feed of provocations.
Cognitively overloaded: Information abundance encourages quick reactions over slow thinking, lowering our volition to critically reflect.
Behaviorally patterned: The more outrage we consume, the more our future behavior becomes predictably nudged.
Oxford’s Word of the Year is a mirror, and the reflection is uneasy: We are learning what AI already knows: Our outrage is both abundant and profitable.
A Practical Takeaway: The BAIT Framework
To navigate an AI-saturated ecosystem without becoming easy bait for algorithms engineered to anger, use BAIT — a simple psychological check-in aligned with four human dimensions: aspirational, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral.
B — Beware (Aspirational)
Ask: Is this pulling me away from the person I want to be?
Content that feeds outrage often erodes long-term goals such as clarity, calm, and constructive action.
A — Assess (Emotional)
Notice your state: What am I feeling right now? Who benefits from me feeling this?
If your heart rate spikes, your attention narrows, or you feel compelled to react instantly, pause.
I — Inquire (Cognitive)
Before sharing, ask: Is the claim verifiable? What context am I missing? Why does this feel urgent?
Outrage thrives when curiosity collapses.
T — Test (Behavioral)
Experiment with alternatives:
Scroll past instead of clicking.
Save the post to revisit later: You likely won’t.
See how you feel after not engaging.
These micro-tests recalibrate your habits — and deny rage bait the fuel it needs.
Rage bait tells a story about the world, but reveals even more about the mind navigating it. Understanding how AI shapes our emotional environment is now part of psychological literacy. With BAIT, we can reclaim a measure of agency, one click (or non-click) at a time.
