Tadej Pogačar had just won the time trial that kicked off the Vuelta a España in Monaco by nine hundredths of a second when Erola Jons managed to get close to him. The organization had hired the Catalan influencer, who has millions of followers, to try a different language on their YouTube and Twitch channels and reach an audience that does not usually follow cycling. Jons called the Slovenian “Pogachitar” several times, commented on the tight shorts of the riders, and when she finally had the winner in front of her, she asked him why he hyperventilated every time he saw her. Pogačar responded with a puzzled “what?”. The images, derivatives, reactions, and comments fueling the controversy began circulating almost immediately.
In the following days, video enthusiasts, sports journalists, and people who probably hadn’t watched a minute of the original broadcast talked about it. Carlos de Andrés criticized it on TVE (he called the video “ridiculous” and spoke of “jocular and sexist” comments) and the UAE team asked the organization that any contact with their riders go through the communications team first. The Vuelta ended up keeping Jons in its coverage, although it restricted her contacts with the cyclists. The organization explained that it sought humor, entertainment, and to reach new audiences. Whether it was premeditated or not is now irrelevant: the outrage took those images much further than any other expert voice in cycling could have ever expected.
They call it rage bait: literally “rage bait,” it refers to content designed to provoke irritation, anger, or offense and in return gain traffic and interaction. The Oxford dictionary chose it as the word of the year in 2025 after detecting that its use had tripled in the previous twelve months (surpassing, at that time, aura farming). The practice is not exactly new: sensationalist press and TV talk shows discovered decades ago that an angry audience is the most passionate.
Digital platforms have added something decisive: transforming every reaction into a quantifiable signal and making the audience compete with each other. Today, rage and anger have become an industry. Outrage is shared more than joy, to which must be added that algorithms prioritize what generates more reactions, regardless of whether you like or loathe the content. The definitive example of the rise of online anger is that, faced with the audience’s weariness of influencers who show off their enviable lifestyle, these same influencers have discovered that if they anger their audience, they regain the coveted engagement, or response. The recipe can be as simple as going into a Starbucks, tuning a coffee until it costs a ridiculous amount of money, and happily paying for it. It’s the $25 coffee technique and is especially effective amid the current inflation crisis, which makes anything start to seem prohibitive.
Make them angry and you will win
A study published in PNAS in 2017 analyzed 563,312 tweets about three highly polarized political debates (gun control, same-sex marriage, and climate change) and found that for every additional word with both moral and emotional charge, the message’s spread increased by about 20%. Years later, another study published in Science Advances, this time on 7,331 users and 12.7 million tweets, observed a complementary mechanism: when someone received social approval after expressing moral outrage, the likelihood of expressing it again in later posts increased. And a study published in Scientific Reports in 2024, built from 95,282 articles from four major newspapers and 579 million posts on Facebook and Twitter, calculated that users shared links to negative news 1.91 times more than to positive news. None of these studies prove that all outrage is posturing or that we always react the same way, but they undoubtedly describe an environment where certain emotions receive greater rewards than others.
Brands, of course, have also caught on. One of the most talked-about cases involved the American actress with blue eyes and blonde hair Sydney Sweeney: in her ad for the jeans brand American Eagle, the wordplay “great jeans / great genes” was automatically read with racial undertones. There were weeks of controversy, with protests from the most progressive flank and with white supremacist groups and other anti-woke collectives appropriating the campaign. Meanwhile, the company’s shares rose.
In 2025, Friend, the company that sells an AI pendant designed to keep company to whoever wears it, spent more than a million dollars plastering the New York subway (a campaign of more than 10,000 ads, some with messages as complacent as “I will never leave the dishes unwashed”). Many ended up covered in graffiti against AI, surveillance, and the replacement of human relationships. It seemed like an advertising disaster until hearing from its founder, Avi Schiffmann, who even proudly photographed himself next to some of the interventions: he knew New York was particularly hostile to artificial intelligence and had commissioned ads with huge white spaces precisely so people would vent on them. When the insults, photos of destroyed posters, and media coverage arrived, the real goal of the campaign was revealed: vandalism.
Many brands already see it as a circulation tax. They think a bit of controlled rage bait, without compromising credibility too much, will help them reach more people.
But something is starting to fail: more and more people know the trick. The first time a video outrages us, we bite, but by the tenth, we recognize the pattern and move on. In fact, the fact that a prestigious dictionary decides that ragebait is its word of the year reveals precisely that our literacy about the phenomenon is increasing. Advertising literature refers to this as knowledge about persuasion, or the knowledge we develop about the techniques used to pull the wool over our eyes. But it doesn’t make us immune either: even if we know we are being manipulated, few refuse a little dopamine hit in a comment thread.
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Right now, many “creators” are going through a burnout moment: if your tactic is short-term and basically consists of angering people, the surprise factor fades and the system itself will force you to raise the stakes every week. Result? Many influencers burn out, get fed up, and even disappear for a while, often replaced by others who end up doing the same but going a little further.
If we add to that fatigue increasingly skeptical audiences and the mentioned loss of momentum of aspirational messages, we face what many already call the fall of the influencers. The decentralized and viral campaign peaked this August, with waves of unfollows to many of the state circuit’s totemic influencers (like Fabiana Sevillano or Marina Rivers) and much derived conversation. Although the data advises caution (advertising investment aimed at influencers in Spain reached 158 million euros in 2025, 25.9% more than the previous year, according to IAB Spain and PwC), everything indicates we are entering a new era.
In a space where spectacle, attention, intimacy, and money have been intertwined for years, it is normal for the formula to run out and boredom and distrust to replace the instant like and affirmation.
This hangover will have more consequences. On one hand, we already have global stars like Charli XCX warning of the arrival of antimarketing (a more intimate, private promotion apparently less concerned with reach). On the other hand, we have rapper Fenix Flexin, an example of how to capitalize not on rage but on ambiguity and doubt. The success of the American, Rubberz, climbed this summer on the Billboard Hot 100 while musicians, producers, and listeners debated whether the song had been generated with AI. Although he initially denied the accusations, Flexin ended up acknowledging the assistance of generative artificial intelligence tools. For weeks, figuring out how much was human and how much synthetic was an inseparable part of the track’s circulation.
Justice warrior content is also starting to gain momentum: videos and reels that confront a stranger for bad behavior and record themselves as heroes of the scene. Cart Narcs, a channel dedicated to chasing people in parking lots who don’t return shopping carts, represents what some already call accountability entertainment, a form of entertainment that consists of monitoring social norms and forcing confrontations that then work as spectacle. Accountability offers the viewer outrage, the opportunity to feel satisfied, and the sensation of being on the right side.
I even go a bit further: if we no longer trust anything or anyone, wouldn’t it make sense that we start to be attracted to everything that seems unfakeable? That which offers no doubt and it is impossible to think it could be a marketing ploy, like religion. This year, for example, philosopher Ernesto Castro reappeared after a long retreat announcing his conversion to Catholicism, his baptism, and a religious experience in Montserrat, and even published a Letter from a Neophyte to the Pope. Although many still think it might be a monumental troll, it is curious to observe how a figure trained in analysis, internet culture, and aware of its different layers of irony suddenly appears publicly speaking of absolutes like revelation and faith.
All this frenzy, flaccidity, and parasitic transformation of ragebait is happening while the design of the platforms that feed it is finally being slightly threatened. The European Digital Services Act already requires TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram to offer the possibility to disable the personalized feed: a wall without an algorithm, ordered chronologically and not by what upsets you the most. In the United States, Meta has agreed to pay about 18 billion dollars to close the lawsuit from dozens of states accusing it of designing Instagram and Facebook to hook minors. Although the company has not admitted wrongdoing, it will have to introduce usage limits aimed at the teenage audience.
It is hard to imagine that any of these measures will reduce the proliferation of toxic dynamics. We have learned to recognize the baits, we know who makes money from our reaction, and we could describe in detail how they manipulate us. Still, it is difficult to break the cycle of rage, reward, and wait for the next public scorn to start again.