The Oxford Word of the Year for 2025 is rage bait, defined as "(n.) Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account." The fact this term has made it's way to Word of the Year is further evidence of the enshitification of the platforms that now dominate the internet. Big tech companies are pushing rage through social media as a drug to maximize attention and keep you glued to their platforms. It's our mental health that pays the price and the overall impacts on society are hard to ignore.

The Cost of Social Media

The internet promised to be a place where information was open and a people could share an interact with each other on a global scale that was not previously possible. A place where people could communicate about what they feel is important, not what they're told. Where we would meet and have meaningful discourse with new and interesting people. A place where "our own Social Contract" defined the rules, free from government oversight and monopolies. John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace is a beautiful depiction of our hopes for the internet in its early days.

This open and distributed dream slowly eroded as capitalism set in and a few large companies became the dominant content providers for the entire internet. As Tom Eastman puts it "I'm old enough to remember when the internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots from the other four.". Today social media sites still represent 4 of the top 10 most visited web sites on the internet. 5 if you include YouTube. Most of content on the internet is now funneled through a small number of tech giants beholden to their shareholders, not their customers (see above "enshitification"). The majority of content most people consume from the internet today isn't information that educates, enlightens and improves their lives. It's a funnel of highly curated data created by algorithms tuned to maximize anger to increase engagement and steal your time and attention to sell ads.

Monetizing Rage

Your attention is the commodity the social media sites compete for. Their bottom line revenues are driven by how long they can keep you on their sites to maximize ad revenue. Multiple studies¹,²,³ have demonstrated that anger and rage drive engagement and sharing over other emotions. The social media platforms have taken note. Algorithms on these platforms intentionally promote content that drives feelings of anger to maximize the amount of your attention they can gain. This isn't a byproduct of the algorithms or how people use social media, it's an intentional tactic they've honed over decades to maximize your attention. Society is becoming addicted to rage in the name of selling more ads.

Negative Effects on Mental Health

When you look at the state of the world today it's pretty hard to ignore the negative effects social media has had on society. Reasonable debates about differences of opinion don't occur, instead we have massive platforms of screaming matches. Posts containing rational conversations, resolving conflicts or coming to peaceful agreements don't go viral. Anger stoking rage bait does.

The broader societal impacts are serious enough, but the most consequential effects have emerged more slowly and are only now becoming fully visible. With a full generation of data now available, it is clear that the effects on children are more insidious, emerging gradually, compounding over time, and far harder to reverse. I've recently started reading the Anxious Generation which documents the full extent this toxic online environment has had on the generation of children that big tech has run a psychological experiment on without their knowledge, consent or anything close to ethical considerations. Australia has recognized this has had such a significant negative impact on children that they've banned social media for children under 16. I support this type of governance and, as a parent of 3 teenagers, would welcome similar laws in Canada. We age-gate alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, pornography and other substances we deem harmful to children. Social media is causing significant, indisputable harm to children and it's time to take action for the safety of children.

Take Control of Your Feed and Your Phone

Are there steps you can take to reduce this? Myself I'm an IT professional and I'm online more than the average person I would say. My career and personal life rely on online information and online social interactions. However I've had increasingly been annoyed that these platforms aren't a valuable use of my time, negatively affect my mood and really don't add a lot of value. I need to consume up to date content and stay abreast of emerging security information as part of my job as a CISO. It's time sensitive and I need mechanisms to get to the information that's important while filtering out the rage bait so I've started consuming the internet a differently and adapted how my phone treats me.

Using RSS to make your own feed

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a technology that has been around since the late 1990s. RSS feeds allow you to get automatic updates from your favorite web sites by subscribing to RSS feeds. For example, an RSS feed for this site is available here (or click RSS in the header). There are a plethora of RSS readers available as browser plugins and mobile apps. Myself I'm currently using feedly.

How RSS Works

RSS works as a decentralized content delivery system, making it a valuable tool for efficiency and privacy. It works like this:

1. The RSS Feed (Publisher): A website that wants to share its new content creates an RSS feed, which is a special file, typically written in XML format. This file resides on the website's server and contains structured data about the latest updates, such as the article's title, link (URL), publication date, and a summary or the full text.
2. The Feed Reader (Subscriber): To use an RSS feed, a user subscribes to the feed's URL using an RSS reader (mobile app or browser plugin).
3. Automatic Aggregation: The feed reader periodically and automatically checks the RSS file on the website's server for new items. When new content is detected, the reader pulls the summary and link and displays it in one convenient dashboard

RSS lets you set up your own custom feed of information you find interesting and authors you want to support without big tech algorithms getting in the way. Your feed stays highly tailored to your tastes because nothing interferes. Generally the content within an individual RSS feed isn't poisoned with rage bait because reputable sites and authors don't want to pollute their content. If you do find content you don't want slipping in simply delete that feed and it's gone.

An argument could be made that I don't get breaking, up to the second information from RSS as I would on real-time feeds but I'm willing to allow a bit of time lag in the interest of not being angry every time I look at my media feed. If there's something breaking I fall back to social media to follow relevant threads.

Digital Self-Monitoring

Filter Alerts and Badges

To take back control so that I can manage what gets my attention as opposed to the device in my pocket I started by disabling all alerts and badges. Set the default to off. From there I methodically added back a small number of things that really do require emergency access to my time, starting with my family. Funny enough social media apps didn't make it back onto the list. There's nothing coming from them that warrants interrupting me or distracting my attention from more important things. It can wait for when I have a free moment and actually choose to doom scroll although this is becoming more rare I find. I also started aggressively using do not disturb mode (DnD). Do not disturb is on most of the time so my phone can't pull my attention away when I don't want it to. I have a handful of apps and contacts that override DnD so I can be reached for emergencies and that rarely happens.

Observing Yourself

Learning of The Hawthorn Effect made me aware that people modify their behavior in response to being observed. This also holds true when the observer is yourself. The psychology term for this appears to be "self-monitoring reactivity". I applied this to this problem by tracking my screen time daily. By just taking a moment each day to review my screen time, which apps I used and set some mental goals on how I want to use that device and which apps give the most value. My top applications are routinely feedly, podcasts and spotify with social media apps barely making an appearance anymore.

Outcome

For me the end result has been that I spend far less time looking at my phone, which I hope translates to spending more time talking to real people. I've taken back control of when I look at my phone as opposed to my phone dictating when it demands attention. I'm not angry every time I open the app I use to stay in touch with the world, read news and learn. Have I lost anything? Quite the opposite. I've gained time, sanity and a better handle on where I choose to spend my time.

I grew up on Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and the early days of the internet that held promise of a wonderful new online world so maybe some of this is nostalgia for me and a longing for the past. I understand we're not going back but that doesn't mean we can't improve things as we move forward. We have solid learnings from the past 20 years on what not to do and warning signs we should be looking for from tech companies. Our eyes are opening up to the psychological harms and wide spread negative impact to mental health from the unwitting experiment we have run on a generation of children. As AI evolves let's remember these lessons and not let a small number of enormous tech companies dupe us again.

References