It is both telling and unsurprising that the Oxford University Press Word of the Year for the recently departed 2025 is “rage bait.”
Rage, after all, seems to have become the default emotional setting for many Americans. Most Americans, maybe. Rage bait – the spelling should probably be squeezed together – serves to stoke that condition.
Oxford, the folks who publish the namesake English dictionary, defines the term as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive.” It is “typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular webpage or social media account.”
So. The tried-and-true method of getting people’s attention is to tick them off. An approach that is encouraged – rewarded – by social media algorithms.
I would expand the definition to suggest that, based on my experience, rage bait is not necessarily fact-based. That is partly explained by another Word of the Year, this one for 2016, describing the kind of world we still live in a decade later: “post-truth.”
That one’s defined as “relating to and denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
Perhaps that’s because, to borrow Jack Nicholson’s oft-quoted line from “A Few Good Men,” we can’t handle the truth. Or don’t want to if it conflicts with our individual notions of reality.
Another possibility: People simply don’t care whether something is true, as long as it makes for a good tale.
A recent example: a Facebook post alleging that the NFL legend Tom Brady had raked the bombastic sports-mouth Stephen A. Smith over the coals on-air for Smith’s negative comments about the Ole Miss football team.
This was tailor-made to appeal to me, both because it defended my alma mater and because it ripped Stephen A., one of the sports world’s most annoying blatherers. And it was quite detailed, describing how Brady calmly debunked every criticism as Stephen A. sat meekly and quietly absorbing the scolding.
The only problem, which you probably have intuited, is that there was no such exchange. Put a little research into it, as I did, and you will find nearly identical Brady-Smith posts purporting to involve the Washington Commanders, the Baltimore Ravens, the Buffalo Bills and the Pittsburgh Steelers. And probably more.
All of it bogus. And all or most of it gullibly swallowed by the credulous fans of the supposedly Smith-maligned teams.
What puzzles me is why rage bait would work. Why anyone, scrolling through his or her social media of choice, would come across something obviously designed to enrage and think, Yep, that’s what I need. A little more anger in my life.
Then again, maybe I’m somewhat guilty of it myself. I used to track various right-wing organizations on Twitter, which subjected me to provocative claims and assertions that were definitely not going to cheer me up. Claims that stealing from public education for private school vouchers is good. That any infringement of freewheeling gun ownership and display is evil. That “illegal aliens” are, by and large, dangerous criminals. That expressing disagreement with a murdered provocateur is a firing offense.
In my defense, my aim was to find topics that I could poke fun at, thereby lowering the temperature of policy debate.
I’ve since abandoned Twitter – OK, X – recognizing it for the black hole of negativity that it increasingly has become. But there’s no escaping the web-based assault on civility.
Australia has passed a social media ban for those younger than 16, owing to its potential for the corruption of young minds. There are murmurs and rumblings of something like that here. Which ignores the mayhem visited upon adult minds.
That brings me around to Oxford’s Word of the Year for 2024, one coined by Henry David Thoreau way back in 1854 but still current and appropriate for our time.
It’s defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
The word: “brain rot.” I’d say it’s an epidemic.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at jrogink@gmail.com