In January, a TikTok couple named Cassie and Jon started posting videos shaming their Airbnb guests over minor cleaning infractions. Dirty dishes. An unfolded throw blanket. The kind of domestic crimes that, in any previous era of human history, would have been resolved with a passive-aggressive note left on the kitchen counter and perhaps a reduced star rating. Instead, Cassie and Jon filmed themselves as they observed tables that moved a few inches.
The internet duly lost its mind. The comments were incandescent. The parodies multiplied. The discourse spread from TikTok to Reddit to Twitter to the kind of group chats where your aunt sends memes. It is now everywhere, and everyone has an opinion, and the opinion was almost uniformly: these people are insufferable.
Subsequent investigation revealed that Cassie and Jon had been running a network of burner accounts and fake fan pages specifically designed to amplify the controversy. The outrage wasn’t a side effect of their content. The outrage was the content. Every furious comment, every mocking parody, every “I can’t believe this” share had been anticipated, engineered, and was generating very real advertising revenue for people who had, correctly, identified your indignation as a monetizable asset.
You were not watching the spectacle. You were building it. And you were doing it for free.
Image credits: mehmet_edip / TikTok
The Outrage Economy: A brief and depressing primer
A landmark 2017 study found that each additional moral-emotional word in a social media post increases the rate at which it is shared by approximately 20%. Per word. Scott Davis, founder and CEO of digital strategy firm Outreacher.io, has watched this play out in real campaigns. “Every single time, with each work we did for a creator who went down the path of outrage and engagement fishery, their reach is guaranteed to multiply 10x,” he says.
“The click-through rates in outrage content plus rage bait headlines were consistently 2-3% higher than neutral and positive ones. For a mid-tier creator, this was enough to double the revenue from YouTube sponsorships overnight.” This is a tasty-looking ROI, with no additional effort beyond making people angry.
Tyler Desjardins, founder of Pivot Creative Media, spends his days managing ad spend and organic content across the same platforms where this all plays out, and he has watched the math from the other side. Outrage drives clicks. But he notes that clicks are not the whole story.
“Those angry clicks bounce very quickly, and that impacts the Google quality score, making the cost per lead go up while clicks appear to look great. I have had clients who are excited about traffic spikes from provocative copy but then are disappointed that the leads barely move.” For brands, outrage is expensive confetti. For pure engagement creators with no product to sell, it is simply free money, printed by your fury.
Image generated by Bored Panda AI
Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and that is the problem
Why did you, a presumably intelligent and discerning person, fall for it? And why will you fall for it again? The answer is that your brain is approximately 300,000 years old and the threat-detection systems running in the background have not received a meaningful update since the Pleistocene.
“Anger activates the amygdala — the brain’s threat-detection centre,” explains psychologist Daria Zalivnova. “It’s fast. It’s automatic. You don’t choose it. And once it’s on, your prefrontal cortex — the part that helps you pause and think — gets quieter. You react before you reflect. That’s why you comment. That’s why you share.”
This is human hardware. Dr. Sal Raichbach, Chief Clinical Officer at The Haven Detox Group, says that “outrage does not just make us feel something; it motivates us to act. People feel compelled to correct someone, defend their group, warn others, or keep looking for evidence.”
Joy doesn’t do that. Sadness doesn’t do that. A cute dog video does not mobilise your sympathetic nervous system and send adrenaline and noradrenaline coursing through your body. A video of a woman scolding you about dishwasher loading technique, delivered with the moral authority of a war crimes tribunal, absolutely does.
The full sequence goes something like this: amygdala fires, stress hormones flood in, prefrontal cortex goes partially offline, and the result is a state of hyper-arousal in which individuals are more prone to impulsive actions like commenting, sharing, or further engaging with the content, as the brain prioritises immediate emotional discharge over thoughtful consideration.
You are not choosing to engage with rage bait. You are, in the most literal neurological sense, discharging. The platforms built a discharge facility, charged advertisers for the walls, and told you it was a social network.
The dopamine loop that closes the circuit is what makes it quite difficult to stop. “You get angry. You engage. You feel a hit of satisfaction,” Zalivnova explains. “The brain learns: this feels productive. This feels important. That’s why it’s so hard to stop. Not because you’re weak. Because your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do.”
Edgar Fabián Frías, licensed marriage and family therapist, connects this directly to evolutionary survival instinct: rage bait “intentionally exploits the archetype of the ‘dangerous other’ to manipulate our moral compass and sense of identity. By threatening our in-group consensus, it preys on our core nature as relational beings who rely on community inclusion for psychological and physical survival.”
In other words, when Cassie tells you that her guest left wet towels on the bathroom floor and that this reflects a fundamental moral failing of the modern houseguest, some ancient part of your brain interprets this as a threat to the tribe. And it responds like a mother bear.
Image generated by Bored Panda AI
The algorithm didn’t find the outrage. It built the outrage.
The popular framing of this problem positions the algorithm as a mirror, reflecting back what users already want. This is, to use the technical term, complete nonsense.
“When it comes to social media algorithms, the word ‘neutral’ is really misleading,” says Caroline McCarthy, Head of Growth at anti-rage bait news app InPress. “If it were neutral, it wouldn’t be constantly assessing what you’re reading and how you’re reacting. It would just feed you what’s popular, whether that’s World Cup headlines or cat videos.”
We have known since a 2009 Ohio State University study that people spend considerably more time with content that validates what they already believe than with content that challenges them. The algorithm knows this. It has always known this. The outrage economy did not emerge organically from user behaviour and get noticed by platforms. The platforms studied user behaviour, identified what kept people on the app longest, and engineered their systems around it.
Davis describes the self-reinforcing loop: “When a creator generates a prompt for a conflict, the algorithm is incentivised to not only reward the hostile video they made once, but also to circulate it multiple times over. Large creators known for rage baiting will regularly ‘paint a target’ on a smaller creator, and users will attack the suggested rage point in troll mobs that flood comments, report videos, and spam the smaller creator’s sponsors. The result is a raging multi-day rage cycle which the algorithm continues to pump out. The combination of audience engagement and algorithm will rack up engagement and ad revenue like a digital colosseum.”
A digital colosseum. The gladiators didn’t know they were performing. The crowd — that’s you — thought they were observers. Everyone was the product.
Content strategist Elliot Sterling notes that the technical solution to all of this is, genuinely, not complicated: “The companies can simply adjust their ranking system by deprioritising anger-producing signals the same way they are already deprioritising spam and deceptive information. The only problem here is not technological in nature at all, but it has to do with the financial side.”
Translation: they could fix it. They will not fix it. Because fixing it costs money and breaking it makes money, and we are all still somehow surprised by this.
Image credits: kues1 / Magnific (not the actual photo)
What it is actually doing to your brain, long term
Beyond the immediate neurological hijack, the long-term effects of sustained rage bait consumption are what the clinical community is most concerned about.
“It rewires how you see the world. Slowly,” Zalivnova says. “You start to expect conflict, to anticipate the worst in people, to feel like the world is a hostile place. The more you consume outrage, the more your brain strengthens the pathways that detect threats. You become more sensitive to cues of injustice, betrayal, unfairness. And the things that used to give you peace — quiet, stillness, ordinary conversation — start to feel flat. The outrage becomes the baseline.”
Dr. Raichbach adds a specific and disturbing finding from the research: “People systematically perceive much more outrage in posts they see on social media than the authors themselves report feeling.” You are reading more anger into content than even the angry person who made it actually felt. The distortion compounds in both directions: the world looks angrier than it is, and you are angrier than you realise.
Psychologist Amberley Meredith frames this as a gradual recalibration with real-world consequences: “If we are constantly viewing the world through an angry lens, we may also begin to misinterpret other people’s behaviour and intentions, reinforcing a perception that the world is more hostile or threatening than it really is.”
Your threat-detection system, trained on a feed, is now running in the supermarket. In the family WhatsApp group. In the conversation with your partner about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher — a sentence that is now, possibly, making you think of Cassie and Jon.
And then there is habituation, the phenomenon that should probably be printed on the front of every smartphone sold. “The first time you see something outrageous, the reaction is strong,” Zalivnova says.
“The hundredth time? It’s weaker. So you need something stronger to get the same response. That’s why the content keeps getting more extreme. Not because creators are evil. Because they’re responding to the same system. The brain adapts. So the content escalates.” It is not a moral failure. It is, as she says, a neurological fact. And it is a neurological fact that the platforms are financially incentivised to accelerate.
Image credits: Arav Shah / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
The advertisers are funding this, and most of them have no idea
Dmitrii Malashkin, founder of Born to Move, ran a controlled experiment with outrage-adjacent content and found that yes, it drove engagement — 30-50% higher impressions than neutral posts — and also attracted “an audience skewed heavily among those who are comfortable with aggressive, combative, and/or vulgar online communication.” People who wanted a fight, not a moving company.
“For us, one negative social incident weighs more heavily in terms of bookings lost than 12 positive comments,” he notes. “I would gladly trade 10,000 rage bait impressions for the reach of one actual brand-loyal advocate.”
McCarthy, who also gave a TED talk on the advertising industry’s role in funding this ecosystem, is more direct: “There’s so much grey area. Most programmatic ad placement doesn’t allow advertisers to control the tone of the content their ads run alongside.”
Your insurance company’s ad appeared next to Cassie explaining that her guest had failed to strip the beds. The insurance company didn’t know, and the platform didn’t care, because the revenue landed in the same place regardless.
Image credits: katemangostar / Magnific (not the actual photo)
The Cassie and Jon equation, solved
Back to our original case study. When the burner account network was exposed, the reaction was predictable: a second wave of outrage, this time about the manipulation itself. More comments. More shares. More engagement. More revenue. The revelation was, functionally, another content cycle. The machine consumed the exposure of the machine and produced more machine.
This is the elegance — if you can bring yourself to call it that — of what Cassie and Jon built, and what thousands of creators are building right now with varying levels of sophistication. The content doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be true. It doesn’t have to be interesting. It has to make you feel something urgent enough that you do something about it. Click. Comment. Share. Parody. Furiously screenshot and send to your group chat under the caption “I can’t believe this.”
Every single one of those actions is a billable unit of engagement. Every billable unit of engagement funds the next cycle. And the next cycle will be slightly more extreme than this one, because the brain adapts, and the content has to keep up.
You know this now. And you will still fall for it, because the prefrontal cortex that processes this information is the same one that goes quiet when the amygdala fires. The knowledge is there. The reflex is faster.
The only genuinely useful response is the boring one: pause before you share. Notice the anger before you act on it. Ask whether the thing that is making you furious was designed to make you furious, and what that design is worth financially to the person who made it. Ask whether your outrage is yours or whether it was manufactured and served to you at the algorithmically optimal moment.
And then, perhaps, go touch some grass. Preferably without filming it for content.
Check out this couple giving you a much less rage inducing version of what Cassie and Jon are up to
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