“Rage bait” becoming Oxford’s Word of the Year 2025 offers a psychological X-ray of (the anglophone parts of) society today. Defined as online content “deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage,” engineered to drive traffic and engagement, rage bait had two challengers: aura farming and biohack. The choice landed at a moment when AI is accelerating the production, timing, and emotional precision of such content, turning outrage into a scalable commodity.

Clickbait relied on curiosity. Rage bait relies on us.

Its logic is simple: If content makes you angry, you spend longer with it, share it more often, and return to the platform more quickly. As lexicographers noted in their announcement, rage bait dominated public conversation because it captures a shift in how emotional manipulation has been woven into the fabric of digital communication. Respectively and combined, the competing trio of 2025 terms reflects our conversations and preoccupations over the past year—especially if we look at its relationship with last year’s choice.

Whereas the 2024 selection, brain rot, captured the cognitive drain of doomscrolling, rage bait puts a spotlight on content that is intentionally produced and positioned to spark outrage and drive clicks. Together, they form a painful cycle in which outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and 24/7 exposure leaves us mentally exhausted.

Making this sad trend even more worrisome is its ascension as our journey amid generative AI is taking us beyond experimentation to integration, which is one step closer to reliance, and only a short distance away from full-blown

© Psychology Today