‘Rage bait’ is the Oxford Word of the Year, showing how social media is manufacturing anger

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.

The aftermath of Graven’s death

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.

Word of the Year

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 click bait to rage bait

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.

A profound change in the web

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.