How content creators profit from rage-baiting

12/30/24 • 4 min

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

Have you ever found yourself angry or outraged at a piece of content on social media? A disgusting recipe or shocking opinion? It could be intentional.

Social media influencer Winta Zesu freely admits that she provokes for profit.

“Every single video of mine that has gained, like, millions and millions of views is because of hate comments,” she said.

The 24-year-old estimates she made $150,000 last year by exploiting an online trend known as rage-baiting.

“Literally, just if people get mad, the video is gonna go viral. I can make money on TikTok. Instagram is paying, like, YouTube pays you. So I was like, OK, I’m just gonna post everything on every platform.”

She’s part of a growing group of online creators making rage-bait content, where the goal is simple: record videos, produce memes and write posts that make other users viscerally angry, then bask in the thousands, or even millions, of shares and likes.

“The more content they create, the more engagement they get, the more that they get paid,” said Andréa Jones, a marketing strategist based in Toronto, Canada. “Even if, even if those views are negative or inciting rage and anger in people.”

Experts say its popularity is due to the way the algorithms are designed, which determine what users see.

“If we see a cat, we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s cute.’ We scroll on,” Jones said. “But if we see someone doing something obscene, we may type in the comments, ‘This is terrible,’ and that sort of comment is seen as a higher-quality engagement by the algorithm.”

But for Ariel Hasell, assistant professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan, the negatives are clear.

“One of the things that we see happen is that people are sort of overwhelmed by negativity in these environments,” she said. “The concern is that long term, we won’t be able to get anybody’s attention and get them to pay attention to the things that we hope that they should be paying attention to.”

We contacted the major social media platforms to see what they had to say about rage-bait on their sites. At the time of publication, we had no responses, but we do know it is on their radar.

In October, a Meta executive took to Threads to report “an increase in engagement-bait” on the platform, adding, “we’re working to get it under control.” But if rage-bait continues to pay, it’s likely to continue to appear in our social feeds.

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

Have you ever found yourself angry or outraged at a piece of content on social media? A disgusting recipe or shocking opinion? It could be intentional.

Social media influencer Winta Zesu freely admits that she provokes for profit.

“Every single video of mine that has gained, like, millions and millions of views is because of hate comments,” she said.

The 24-year-old estimates she made $150,000 last year by exploiting an online trend known as rage-baiting.

Experts say its popularity is due to the way the algorithms are designed, which determine what users see.

But for Ariel Hasell, assistant professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan, the negatives are clear.

We contacted the major social media platforms to see what they had to say about rage-bait on their sites. At the time of publication, we had no responses, but we do know it is on their radar.

Previous Episode

How China’s EV market could endure higher tariffs

It’s fair to say China dominates in electric vehicle sales. The country is the world’s biggest consumer of electric cars and has dozens of automakers competing in the space. Last year, Chinese companies sold about 9.5 million EVs and plug-in hybrid cars.

But the industry faces mounting trade pressures. The Biden administration imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, which President-elect Donald Trump is expected to continue. Meanwhile the European Union recently raised tariffs up to 45%, citing concerns that Chinese government subsidies give its companies an unfair advantage.

Subsidies certainly help, but there are other factors giving Chinese EVs an edge. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak about how those factors could keep Chinese EV makers competitive, even in a more restrictive global market.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Jennifer Pak: There are multiple factors, and different people will emphasize different points to it. So one of the things is China has a complete supply chain. It has cheap labor. There’s fierce competition amongst all of the Chinese companies here. There’s a big demand, a big market and subsidies. According to a consultancy, Automobility, they say that batteries account for over half of the cost of the EVs. So if you can imagine, China controls the processing of the raw materials all the way down to the assembly, it means you can negotiate good prices, especially if you order in massive quantities. So if you, you know, have more volume, then prices per unit comes down. And then there’s also cheap labor. So for example, in the U.S. last year, it was $28 per hour for an autoworker, whereas when we went to Central China, at one of the BYD factories in Changsha, we spoke to assembly workers who said they earned about $1,000 a month, which is pretty good for factory work in China, but because of the amount of overtime they have to put in, it works out to at best $3.60 an hour. So that’s quite a difference from $28 an hour.

McCarty Carino: And when we say that Chinese EVs are cheaper, we should specify, I mean, there are several models that are less than $20,000, right?

Pak: Yes, for sure, but a lot of the companies want to get a higher profit margin, so in fact, they want to sell the higher end ones. And what we’ve been told by experts is that even if they compare to their relative peers, you know, it’s still cheaper because they have better features, or they put more features into the car.

McCarty Carino: As it becomes kind of increasingly difficult to sell to Western markets, do you think these competitive advantages hold up down the road?

Pak: Yes, for the simple reason about the battery, that supply chain being locked in China right now is really essential to keeping prices low. The labor cost is less so because actually wages have become higher and higher, and factories are becoming more automated, so that’s becoming less of a factor. But the other thing that we were talking about is value for money, right? So Chinese EV companies are not really looking to export its cheapest models. Certainly, certain countries would want that, but what they want is to get higher profit margins. And China has an advantage in that it doesn’t just manufacture EVs, it manufactures quite a lot of things that go into the EVs. Like, for example, I went into one of the cheaper models. It was $18,000, it’s the BYD Qin, and it’s super basic, so basic that in the back there’s no air vents, there’s no entertainment system, but now the replacement model comes automatically with an app where you can remotely start the air conditioning. It has some voice control functions. So it’s these sort of “braggable” features in an EV which would prompt consumers to buy and I think as we go further down the road and as more companies start producing EVs, I think that might be one of the f...

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Futurist forecasts convergence of key technologies into “living intelligence”

2024 was all about the artificial intelligence boom. That was true for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, but also the case on a wider, more practical level, with AI becoming increasingly visible in our schools, offices and social media feeds.

AI advances are sure to remain a massive part of the tech economy, but in the coming year, we could see more sci-fi-like tech becoming reality, according to futurist Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Webb about some of the emerging trends she’s watching for in 2025, including a potential evolution in AI tech that she calls living intelligence.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Amy Webb: This year, everybody has been focused exclusively on artificial intelligence as the next big thing, and the issue is that artificial intelligence is already here, but worse, it’s actually connected to two other critical areas of technology that haven’t gotten as much attention. Those are advanced sensors and biotechnology. Together, artificial intelligence as the foundation with sensors and biotechnology are kind of creating yet another new field of technology, one that I’m calling living intelligence. And basically, living intelligence creates systems that can sense and learn and adapt and evolve, which means that as technology progresses in one of those fields, it sort of creates this flywheel effect. Living intelligence is going to drive an exponential cycle of innovation, of growth. It will disrupt businesses. It will change our reality, and it won’t happen overnight, but we’re at the beginning of a long-term cycle where living intelligence will play a pretty significant role.

Meghan McCarty Carino: Paint a little bit of a picture for me of what this might look like. How is bioengineering and sensors and artificial intelligence all put together in this?

Webb: So there’s a nationwide shortage of nitrile gloves. These are the gloves that you encounter at a restaurant or at a doctor’s office. The problem with nitrile gloves is that they require basically a handful of ingredients that are hard to source, specifically in the United States. There’s just no way for us currently to keep up with the demand. Now, what if there was a different way to produce the substance, the rubberlike substance that goes into these nitrile gloves? In fact, there is, and that’s because of living intelligence. In addition to all of the work that Google has done on artificial intelligence, they’ve also been working in the field of what’s called generative biology to generate molecules or genomes, right? New materials. And that’s exactly what Google has been working on, which means that in the near future, artificial intelligence combined with biotechnology could lead to an abundant supply of nitrile gloves, but even better, inventing a new substance that’s very similar. It’s plausible that we will have any number of new materials that will help us with the current shortages and problems that we have with things like petroleum and plastic. The point of living intelligence is that we’re looking at the different convergences between AI, advanced sensors and biology.

McCarty Carino: All right. Another area that you write about is crypto and kind of the continuing thaw of the crypto winter. We have an incoming administration, an incoming Congress seen as more friendly towards crypto. We have already seen the markets respond to that. But what does it mean for crypto, and you know, kind of the blockchain as technology?

Webb: So the inbound president, President [Donald] Trump, has picked Paul Atkins, who is a self-proclaimed crypto fanboy, as the next chair of the [Securities and Exchange Commission]. Why is this significant? Well, it’s significant because up until now, crypto has kind of been a frontier technology, and it just hasn’t been part of the agenda for the financial agencies and institutions in the United States. But that’s going to change next year, and that’s because we have an incoming administration that’s not just enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies, the president himself has one. World Liberty Financial is itself a very early crypto venture that has the backing of President Trump. So this is incredibly important going forward for a couple of reasons. So first, if you’re a holder of cryptocurrency, you’re probably looking at a good year. But if we zoom out a little bit, you know, a lot of other countries around the world are trying to unhook from the dollar, and they are looking at cryptocurrency and blockchain as a potential way to do that. Some countries have already launched digital currencies, that includes Brazi...