Was 2025 the year of peak ragebait?

In November 2025, the social media platform X rolled out a highly controversial update. Overnight, many accounts had their country or region publicly displayed in their bio, in what head of product Nikita Bier called an “important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square”. This included a few surprises. For example, a screenshot quickly circulated showing that the account for the US Department of Homeland Security was actually based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Bier himself denied this, calling it “fake news”. 

But there was another, undeniable trend: many accounts known for stirring up trouble about politics in Europe and America were revealed to be based thousands of miles from the places they claimed to represent. An account called TRUMP ARMY was based in India. A conspiracy account titled MAGA Storm was posting from Eastern Europe. On the other side of the aisle, a “proud Democrat” and “professional MAGA hunter” was actually in Kenya. Their content was overwhelmingly divisive and, yes, rage-inducing.

What dark forces were behind these posters? Is this the foreign interference that politicians have been warning us about? A psy-op, outsourced beyond national borders? As some commentators pointed out, there’s a much more obvious reason staring us in the face: right now, ragebait is a surefire way to drive engagement on social media, where clicks and comments can be traded for cold, hard cash. And sure, riling up a few thousand posters won’t make you rich, but in places where work is scarce and/or wages are low, it might just earn you a living. Do you need to believe the dumb, hateful opinions you’re spouting to receive a payout? Not at all. In fact, some of the accounts have changed their angle entirely over their lifespan, hiding behind a change of username.

It’s not only political shitposters that have learned how to mine our limbic system for profit, either. In 2025, ragebait spread so far and wide that Oxford University Press named the term its word (or phrase) of the year. As a marketing tool, it became a part of fashion, film, and advertising. It infiltrated the laissez-faire world of online sex work. And, in a particularly dark turn, it proliferated at the highest level of international politics.

In case you aren’t fully aware what ragebait actually is, allow Oxford University Press to clear it up. According to their word of the year entry, it’s defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”. Arguably, its roots go back much further than this, to the age of tabloid newspapers and TV news – even online, it was first mentioned in 2002 – but the cash-for-engagement dynamics of current social media have taken it to a whole new level.

Why have the experts decided that 2025 is the year to pen ragebait in the history books? President of Oxford Languages Casper Grathwohl points to a dawning awareness around how the phenomenon shapes our emotions and interactions online, which correlates with a surge in the usage of the phrase. “Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions, and how we respond,” he says in an OUP statement. “It feels like the natural progression in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human in a tech-driven world – and the extremes of online culture.”

In fact, a lot of the ragebait has happened on the frontiers of new and emerging technologies. Take, for example, Friend, the company that makes virtual companion pendants you wear around your neck – when it bought up billboards across US subways and bus stops, people delighted in defacing them with anti-AI slogans. Founder Avi Schiffmann, however, leaned into the controversy, resharing the graffiti messages on social media. On X, he also reshared a video of the LAPD pursuing a murder suspect, in which they happened to pass by a Friend billboard. “Money well spent,” he wrote. 

Then, there’s the Artisan AI ad campaign that hit billboards across London in June, advising companies to “stop hiring humans”. Obviously, this played into widespread fear and anger about AI job displacement – and it worked, generating thousands of outraged posts and dozens of thinkpieces. A similar ragebait campaign across San Francisco saw the company targeted with death threats. “Was it worth it?” read its June blog post. “Yes.”

Another public figure who might find themselves asking “Was it worth it?” at the tail end of this year is Sydney Sweeney. If the controversy somehow passed you by, despite engulfing the rest of the internet, the then-27-year-old actor starred in a jeans ad for American Eagle this summer, with the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The wordplay – the word “jeans” doubles as “genes” – passed absolutely nobody by, with many pointing out that it wasn’t such a cute joke amid a right-wing culture that increasingly embraces eugenicist beliefs, especially after casting a model with famously blonde hair and blue eyes. Are we really supposed to believe that the brand’s marketing team was oblivious to this heated atmosphere, or that they didn’t understand the implications of their own pun?

This is not to say that Sweeney is complicit in American Eagle’s ill-conceived campaign, although she did recently apologise for her silence regarding its online aftermath (which, by the way, contributed to American Eagle’s stocks surging by 25 per cent). It’s also difficult to believe that fellow celebrities, including Beyoncé, Addison Rae, and the members of Katseye, really wanted to wade into the so-called “denim war” when they released their own jeans adverts in the months that followed. Yet they did, and the respective clothing companies – Levi’s, Gap, and Lucky Brand – reaped the benefits, while the discourse only heated up.

At the height of ragebait summer, the trend also entered the beauty industry via the US cosmetics brand e.l.f., which hired Matt Rife – an actor and comedian famous for making a joke about domestic violence, followed by an ableist fake apology – to front a campaign. The brand later apologised (kind of). “But make no mistake, e.l.f. knows what they’re doing,” said marketing professor Sam Ogborn in a post on the controversy. “They’re clearly willing to offend and also absorb the backlash from their core customer.” Why? Because: “Right now, brands know that they have to game social media algorithms to be seen. And to do so, courting backlash is a very cost-effective way to get attention in a short amount of time.”

These cheap tactics aren’t confined to in-your-face marketing campaigns. From the smartphone screen to the cinema screen, ragebait has also crept into content itself. Take the two British adult content creators, Lily Phillips and Bonnie Blue, who’ve had TV documentaries aired about them this year, for sleeping with 100 and 1000+ men in one day, respectively. Yes, their exploits were inspired by the logic of the internet, but mainstream TV is more than happy to feed on the scraps. Or take the 2025 trailer for Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which prioritises “aggressively provocative” content over any sense of historical accuracy or faithfulness to the source text. “Ragebait has long been Fennell’s modus operandi,” as Dazed’s Serena Smith wrote earlier this year. But it all makes sense when you consider that the internet is – again – at the centre of any modern marketing campaign. “With so many competing demands on our attention, the only way of creating something truly thumb-stopping (and subsequently lucrative) is by being as provocative as possible.”

There can be value in provocation, of course. Artists have proven this across history, from Manet painting a nude sex worker in the mid-1800s (quelle horreur!) to Marina Abramović’s recent Balkan Erotic Epic, featuring no less than 70 nude performers in a variety of shocking tableaus. Subversive provocation can push social norms – about gender, sexuality, race, and much more – forward in a meaningful way. But ragebait is empty. It doesn’t actually want to change anything, only to extract as much as it can from the system we’ve currently got. An ‘art form’ can hardly be revolutionary if it’s practised by the official White House Instagram, can it? And Donald Trump’s government is very much joining in on the ragebait when it posts horrendous memes of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’, deportations, and Ice raids, soundtracked by Sabrina Carpenter (to her open disgust) and Taylor Swift (to her incriminating silence). As is Elon Musk when he jokes about being an actual Nazi.

The fact that we’re becoming “increasingly aware” of ragebait, as OUP’s Casper Grathwohl tells us, is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, maybe we can build some resilience toward the kind of content that’s hard-coded to raise our hackles, and simply not get so mad. On the other, we find ourselves in a position where we believe anything could be ragebait, and there’s no clear way to tell the real dumb posts from the fake dumb posts. When Tucker Carlson asks his fellow right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos if he’s gay, are they having a serious, bigoted conversation or just farming engagement via a manufactured meme? Did an influencer really gift her boyfriend a trip to Auschwitz, hidden inside a birthday cake, or did they just know that the internet would explode and boost their monthly revenue? Was Caroline Calloway trolling or just being coy when she refused to confirm whether or not she slept with Luigi Mangione, AKA “literally fucked the United Healthcare CEO assassin”?

Maybe the ragebait doesn’t really matter – maybe we should just log off, or learn to take a joke! Maybe it will make the internet even more nonsensical than ever and cease to be a viable tactic, or even speed up the collapse of social media as we know it (if this is the case, I’d like to apologise to all the ragebaiters out there... I wasn’t familiar with your game). Right now, though, it’s only producing the kind of confusion and ambiguity that’s credited with the normalisation of Donald Trump as a political figure in the mid-2010s, via Pepe memes and jokes about his funny haircut. At worst, this chaos provided right-wing actors with plausible deniability as they became increasingly open about their regressive views; at best, it served as a funny distraction while they seized political power. Almost a decade later, with that in mind, it’s probably worth paying attention to what (if anything) the ubiquitous ragebait is trying to normalise or distract us from today. What horrors lurk beneath an Emily Brontë character fingering a dead fish?