It
shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Oxford Dictionary
has named “rage bait” its Word of the Year. The
quantity of live-streamed drama in 2025 has made it clear
that outrage is now fuelling much online content.
The
death of French streamer Raphaël Graven, alias Jean Pormanove,
was particularly striking in this respect. Before dying live
on Kick after streaming for 298 hours, Graven had been subjected
to humiliating scenes and psychological abuse from two co-streamers,
according to an investigation by French news outlet Médiapart.
Although
the recording of the live stream leading up to his death is
no longer available, excerpts from previous broadcasts that
show Pormanove being ridiculed or mistreated continue to circulate
online.
As
an associate professor and doctoral student at UQAM’s
École des médias (School of Media), I closely
study the dynamics that shape digital platforms. Increasingly,
platforms use rage bait to turn anger into a tool for attracting
attention and advancing their commercial goals.
The
Kick platform, comparable to Twitch, has been blamed for Graven’s
death, and rightly so. A lack of moderation and the encouragement
of gambling and games of chance are among the most frequent
criticisms directed at it.
Just
a few days after Graven’s death, 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska
was stabbed to death on the subway in the North Carolina city
of Charlotte. Images and surveillance footage of her death
went viral via X, Instagram and TikTok in a matter of hours,
showing the young woman wounded, alone and without help.
The
fascination with Zarutska’s slaying is nothing new.
What’s more unusual, and turns this into rage bait,
is how it was exploited.
Conservative
YouTuber Benny Johnson accused the news media of ignoring
the case, claiming that “if she were black and her killer
white, the media would be talking about it non-stop.”
His statement was intended to elicit a strong emotional reaction
from both sides.
Beyond the reappropriation of news items to produce content
designed to provoke outrage, the past year was also marked
by the strategic use of videos generated by artificial intelligence
for the same purpose.
One
example is the sequence depicting the the president of the
United States as a “king” flying over a “No
Kings” protests and dropping a brown liquid resembling
excrement onto the crowd. It was even shared by Donald Trump
himself last October.
In this highly charged context, rage bait became Oxford Dictionary’s
Word of the Year, with its use reportedly tripling over the
last 12 months. The term is defined as “online content
deliberately designed to elicit anger,” which is “typically
posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with
a particular web page or social media account.”
Oxford
Words of the Year have been linked to digital culture for
several years now. In 2022, it was “goblin mode,”
in 2023, “rizz” won the vote and in 2024, it was
“brain rot.”
This
year, more than 30,000 people voted to elect the 2025 Word
of the Year. The term was in competition with “aura
farming” — cultivating one’s aura —
and “biohack”, a set of practices aimed at optimizing
the health and performance of the body and mind through changes
in lifestyle, diet and technology.
From
online clickbait, we are now moving towards rage bait, with
the same objective: to gain online visibility.
The
problem lies not only with content creators who use this type
of bait, but also with social media platforms themselves.
A decade ago, platforms were described as echo chambers, spaces
where users were exposed almost exclusively to content that
confirmed their interests, opinions and beliefs. It’s
getting harder to say that today.
Beyond
the case of the platform X — which Elon Musk has already
significantly revamped since acquiring Twitter — both
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew also
relaxed their terms of service in 2025 in the name of freedom
of expression.
Zuckerberg
is seeking to reconnect with the American Republican political
class, while Chew is attempting to maintain TikTok’s
access to the American market, which is under threat from
legislative pressure. This new approach is leading to the
emergence of digital spaces where controversial content, particularly
rage bait, is acceptable.
TikTok
claims to prohibit bloody or disturbing content, even if it
is in the public interest, in addition to having a mission
to “inspire creativity and bring joy.”
But
this type of content generates engagement. As a result, it
circulates and continues to be recommended. It remains visible
thanks to its profitability.
This
paradox lies at the heart of the problem: different platforms
say they want to limit violence, but they profit from the
elements that make violence go viral. So we’re therefore
trapped in an ecosystem where outrage becomes an economic
resource and where the most intense emotions fuel visibility.
In
this sense, the shift from clickbait to rage bait is not just
an evolution in visibility techniques. It highlights a profound
change in social media.
This
dynamic calls for a rethinking not only of moderation rules,
but also of the business models that maintain this cycle of
exposure, outrage and profitability.
In
light of France’s commission of inquiry into the psychological
effects of TikTok on minors and other similar work, the Oxford
Dictionary’s choice seems less like a lexical tribute
than an acknowledgement of social media’s failures.
The
recent Words of the Year illustrate an online environment
where mental exhaustion, numbness and outrage have become
commonplace. Graven’s death reminds us that human lives
are caught up in systems that turn vulnerability into spectacle
and suffering into a product.
This article is republished from The
Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Read the original
article.
