On TikTok, creators farm rage to get clicks and make money. But it can be a fast race to the bottom.
For about a year, barista and TikToker Ryan Gawlik has been intentionally pissing people off with his coffee content. In TikTok videos, Gawlik will wrongly call espresso "expresso," or mercilessly bite into a whole KitKat bar because he knows it will incense an internet that finds this kind of behavior viscerally upsetting.
Angle down icon An icon in the shape of an angle pointing down. Anger and indignation is potent online. Research shows it's the most common way people are sharing and engaging with content on social media. emojipedia; Rebecca Zisser/InsiderRedeem now
'Rage-baiting' has been an effective way to grow engagement since the days of pundit cable news.
On TikTok, creators say it's been on a steady rise because it's the most effective way to go viral.
Creators feel pressure to rage-bait to get ahead, but it creates hostility online.
For about a year, barista and TikToker Ryan Gawlik has been intentionally pissing people off with his coffee content.
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It's been mostly harmless—but it's also become a kind of proven growth hack to sustain his career. Since he started posting incendiary content—posts intended to get people a little riled up, or ignite in-fighting in the comments, engagement has increased fivefold, he told Insider. He's also gained more than 350,000 followers (he currently has 1.2 million). And he can feel a bit more secure about a career on social media.
Gawlik is among a growing number of creators on TikTok who incite rage, both low stakes and high, to get views. Some call it rage-farming or rage-baiting — whatever the name, it's been used since the early days of social platforms to keep users clicking. Social media anthropologists say it's a tried-and-true technique to grow followers in an attention-based economy where generating engagement, positive or negative, is lucrative digital currency.
But the quiet wrestling match for follower engagement has only grown more contentious in recent months. Insider spoke with seven creators who are a part of TikTok's new revenue-sharing program Pulse, which rewards "the top 4%" of all qualifying videos with half the revenue generated from in-feed ad placements. All seven said they've noticed more rage-baiting on their timelines than ever before. With low payouts from TikTok's Creator Fund, a looming recession, and struggling to sustain growth, creators are amping up rage-baiting to get more eyeballs on their content. It's become, as one creator put it, "a race to the bottom."
For TikTokers, clicks are currency, and it doesn't matter how they get themA TikToker angering viewers in a video about how Gen Zers make coffee. TikTok / @colie1
For as long as cable news punditry has been around, people have weaponized anger to captivate audiences. Social media allowed that anger to become a boundless and flourishing force that's wormed its way into nearly every aspect of our lives. We're mad…about everything…all the time.
As writer Molly Jong-Fast noted in The Atlantic earlier this year, "Rage farming is the product of a perfect storm of fuckery, an unholy mélange of algorithms and anxiety." Social media platforms don't care if the message is uplifting or toxic. As long as people are interacting with it, platforms will spread it even further.
The creators Insider spoke with called out far-right political provocateurs and commentators Ben Shapiro, Brett Cooper, a conservative talking head for The Daily Wire with her own TikTok channel, and @the_dadvocate, an account run by a woman who advocates for men's rights, as rage-baiters.
But they also referred to several progressive-minded Tiktokers as rage-baiters, including Aunt Karen, who's dedicated her account to calling out and identifying racist behavior, and RX0rcist, a professional pharmacist who calls out users who she believes are sharing unsound medical advice.
While many of these creators have built flourishing social media careers fanning fury on social injustices or wokeness (each holding a million or several million followers), not everyone is willing to admit that it's an effective growth strategy.
Most of the named creators disputed the idea that they rage-farm. Shapiro told Insider he wasn't familiar with the term or the practice.
"I only post material I believe," he said in an email statement. "If people are angered by it, that's their prerogative."
Lauren, who's known as @the_dadvocate to her 1.3 million followers, doesn't believe she rage-farms in her TikToks because she says she sincerely stands by every point she makes.
"No, I do not rage-bait, but I'm familiar with the accusation," she told Insider. "For the accusation to be true, it relies on the creator to be disingenuous and to not actually believe in the things they talk about, and I do."
Lauren added that her videos — some of which include pointing out "partner shaming" against men and the high standards men are held to — are meant to make people uncomfortable. But she thinks taking pointed positions on contentious inter-gender issues is bringing people together, not further dividing them.
"I get messages all the time from men telling me I inspire them to be better partners to their wives, from wives telling me I'm helping them understand their husbands," she said. "There are far more factors to my motivation than just making people mad and making myself money."
For Aunt Karen, whose real name is Denise Bradley, and Savannah Sparks, the woman behind RX0rcist, their relationship to rage-farming is more complicated. They both unequivocally deny doing it, but also say that anger is a necessary weapon for fighting medical misinformation and racial inequities online.
"Many people believe that my content is rage-baiting simply because they're uncomfortable with the reality Black people and other people of color face in this world," Bradley told Insider. "I believe in order to push for change, we must see the world as it is. I don't believe in sugarcoating issues … so if people feel that I'm rage-baiting, you should ask yourself: 'what is she trying to get us to see?'"
Sparks told Insider that she doesn't see her impassioned reactions to misinformation and shoddy science as rage-baiting. Moreover, if it is, so what? She's trying to do right in this world, she believes.
"Reporting on science, misinformation, and crimes isn't rage-baiting … Rage-baiting is deliberate manipulation," she said. "I tell the truth and, as [fellow TikToker] Drew Afualo eloquently put it, I never said I was nice."
When purposely making mistakes lands you viewsTikToker Ryan Gawlik bites into a whole KitKat bar in a video about Mariah Carey's Christmas hit stats. TikTok / @coffeefanatics
Ryan Gawlik, however, is candid, and in moments, unashamed, about being an internet farmhand who harvests rage. That may be because his content is lower-stakes than the others.
"If it was an apple pie, I would say a pumpkin tart or something like that, something really silly. And I would put in the title wrong, and I would put in the hashtags, or reacting to things, wrong," he said.
Gawlik started doing this when he experienced two major challenges almost all creators face at some point: his follower growth started to flatline, and people began trolling him for getting things wrong — at first, inadvertently. Gawlik said he experienced harassment in 2021 over a matcha tutorial he posted where he forgot to include a step to pre-wet the whisk. People called him culturally insensitive, and some even showed up to his workplace to shame him for it. (Gawlik told Insider he actually did pre-wet the whisk when he was making the video but decided not to include the footage in the final cut because the audio was bad.)
In any case, he learned quickly the impossibly high standards people are held to on the internet:
Gawlik was commiserating with his other creator friends when they suggested that he plant his own careless mistakes in his videos. Hey, if commenters will call you out when you're not trying to make mistakes, why not take control of that paradigm, they suggested?
"I think having that ability to understand that if you purposely make yourself vulnerable, you can create a situation where you control the hate in a sense," he said.
His creator friends were right. He saw his videos garner more comments, which only made them more attractive to be featured on the FYP more often, and soon his followers grew. He even began A/B testing his content: he'd post one video where he didn't plant a silly mistake or detonate a fiery take to make a point, and one that was more straightforward, and he noticed that the ones that compelled a heated response from viewers saw at least three to five times more reach and comments.
"I had one situation where people corrected me so much, it got to, I think, 5 million views and just out of that silly little thing," Gawlik said.
Anger permeates faster, and more powerfully, on social media. And that's backed by data.Conservative commentator Brett Cooper posts a TikTok about why she's a Republican TikTok / @brettcooper_
His test has been backed by research. Researchers from Beihang University in China in 2013 found that Weibo users shared disgust and righteous indignation more often than content that elicited emotions like joy and sadness.
Experts told Insider that creators are incentivized to play into these emotional apparatuses because it's what the public and big social media tech companies want.
"The goal of social media platforms is to keep people engaged for as long as possible," Yotam Ophir, a professor at the University of Buffalo who studies misinformation and extremism, said. "Ironically enough, it doesn't really matter if this attention is positive or negative ... it doesn't matter to them if we enjoy the video or we get angry at it, as long as we're staying, listening, commenting, and sharing it with our friends."
It's also why algorithms on TikTok and YouTube may feed you conservative-leaning videos even if you've engaged more with left-leaning ones. It benefits the platforms to give you what you want and what you don't want.
Ophir believes it's a fair practice if creators are harnessing rage or manipulating engagement in small ways to keep up with the online economy. He pointed to the phrase "if you disagree with me, let me know in the comments," as a benign and common way that creators do this every day.
Where we need to be more conscientious about creators doing this is when it starts to seed conspiracy and extremism.
"If you think of online provocateurs, like Ben Shapiro, when he writes something offensive on Twitter, he knows that he's going to get engagement from his supporters, but also from people who resist him. Some of them will retweet him to criticize them, some of them will go into the comment section to fight back," Ophir said.
"It's often the case that the most provocative, emotional, outrageous, sensational stuff is what keeps us engaged. That's just a sad reality. Often, that kind of stuff that keeps us engaged is also racist and hateful and misinformed and conspiratorial in nature."
And in a worst-case scenario, rage-baiting jumps off of the screen and into the real world.
Why incensed TikToks may be on the rise recentlyTikTokers The Dadvocate and Rx0rcist respond and shout back at commenters who attack their ideals. TikTok / @the_dadvocate / @rx0rcist
From petty instances to politically treacherous ones, several TikTokers say there's been a steady increase in rage-baiting in recent months.
Cecelia Gray (@ceceliaisgray), who riffs on pop culture to more than a quarter of a million followers on TikTok, has a few theories as to why.
"There has been a little bit of an uptick recently," Gray said. "I think it's a combination of a recent change to how TikTok was going to be looking at our videos on the backend for recommendation, and they started prioritizing people who understand and utilize SEO a little bit."
Insider has reached out to TikTok for comment.
Gray says competition to be in the Pulse program is also driving rage-baiting.
"The uptick sort of started when people stopped seeing that instant gratification. And now that we know Pulse exists and we are all enrolling in it, there has been sort of a steady incline of people saying, 'Well, I have to be the most viral.'"
Nikki Apostolou, a TikToker who speaks about body positivity and indigenous issues, has also noticed more negatively-driven videos on her FYP over the last month.
"I noticed there was more aggression overall. Across all topics. many began to start out with something negative over positive," she told Insider. Apostolou herself is feeling the pressure to comply.
"If I do a video on cultural appropriation or anything where I start it off telling people they can't do something…that video will usually get a lot of views because of the arguments it starts," she continued. "Content doesn't seem to be geared towards positive discussion anymore. There's a lot of shift to shock value. That's what gets views. That's what gets pushed, so people repeat that formula."
Creators want TikTok to better regulate rage-farming videos, particularly the ones that are conspiratorial or categorically spread disinformation. Danielle Kramer, a clinical sexologist who also posts sex education videos on TikTok, said the platform should employ human moderators to step in when a rageful video becomes endangering to people's health and safety. She also recommends that it verify users are at least 18 years old.
Ophir, however, does not have a lot of hope that social media companies will take responsibility because they financially profit from this practice. He instead advises people to hold government officials accountable — to write to them so they can write bylaws that can put safer guardrails in place.
And, as the internet adage goes, he encourages people not to feed the trolls.
"People should understand that it's not that Elon Musk is just provocative and enjoys it. He actually does it because it's a financially viable strategy for him," he said.
"They should be willing to say, 'I'm not playing along with this. I'm not responding to any of that.'"
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