The sainted Oxford English Dictionary, a very comprehensive compendium of the English language that was first compiled in the 19th century, now delights its online audience by nominating a word of the year. Each year, us word nerds look forward to the Word of the Year, the word that will sum up the zeitgeist of the past 365 days.

This last year’s offering was very apt. “Rage bait,” which, according to the OED, is 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.” It’s all that stuff that you consume and that frankly pisses you right off.

How did we get here, to the point where we go online to get frustrated and angry? How did we get to the point where social media becomes antisocial, in the sense that we live online to one-up our opponents, viz., random people or bots we’ve never met? That is more complicated than perhaps I can answer here, but let’s discuss an important aspect of rage bait that goes back several thousand years.

Raging Against the Machine

You’ve seen it before. If you’ve stepped online for more than a few minutes, you have encountered rage bait. The ranty short videos, the memes that point out something horrible someone has done, the influencers writing up outrage content. And the people who respond to this with fury and indignation. It can be exhausting when the only online interactions you have are centered around anger, frustration, and pissing contests.

Unfortunately, social media lends itself to provocative content. In fact, divisive content often drives more reactions, comments, and views than that which does not play upon the emotions. (I am not going to link anything here, as you can search this and see how many advertising companies swear by this.) This creates an environment in which our online experience centers around emotion, impulsivity, and often anger.

And provocative content provokes reactions, in more ways than one. Post a picture of the pizza you ate? Good luck getting engagement. Post that same picture with pineapple and query about that debate and you will be inundated. Divisiveness is expected, as is “winning” arguments. Many of these arguments we consider “bad faith” arguments, that is, arguments that are made without care for truthfulness, validity, or anything else, really. They are made so that the arguer can “win.”

Aristotle and Rhetoric: How It Works

To better understand the divisive nature of rage bait, it’s essential to head back to ancient Greece and talk to Aristotle. Aristotle, an incredible polymath of whom we have spoken before, was instrumental in the formation of rhetoric, the art of persuasive argumentation or writing. The idea behind rhetoric, in a society that prided itself on political discourse, is that you can take apart and create arguments in a very logical, concise way. In other words, there is a formula to the art of persuading others.

Rhetoric was not foreign to ancient Greece before Aristotle set up shop there. The Sophists, traveling tutors who specialized in teaching rich dudes cool stuff, were known for their love of rhetoric and debate. Sophists, who now have a very bad reputation indeed, liked to see how well they could “win” an argument, prove their point, and destroy their opponent, no matter the cost, no matter the weakness of the premise. Basically, they were the podcasters of the ancient world.

This doesn’t sit well with people like Aristotle, who like the idea of persuasion and persuasive arguments, but do not appreciate the way these other bros manipulate their audience in their arguments, and, more importantly, argue just for the sake of arguing. So, Aristotle considers that there should be limitations and rules about the nature of making an argument. He sets up what we now call the Rhetorical Triangle.

The Rhetorical Triangle focuses on three important concepts of argumentation: logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos is simply the rationality of the argument. How logical is the argument’s premise? How much does it make sense? Ethos involves the speaker. What kind of person is the speaker? What are the speaker’s credentials and can we trust them to make this argument? And finally, pathos involves the emotional appeal of an argument. How passionately persuasive is the argument? How does it affect the person receiving it, the audience?

This triangle is often taught to beginning writers in college, as a basic formula for writing well. As you progress in your writing, you can enhance these three concepts, use them to your advantage, but all three remain, to greater or lesser extent. And it makes sense. You aren’t going to be able to follow a word salad argument, wouldn’t want to hear a philosophy professor’s instructions on plumbing, and don’t want to read something that doesn’t pull you in and make you feel like it matters. 

When we complain about bad writing, we might be rolling our eyes at how nonsensical a (probably AI-written) text on a historical figure reads, might get frustrated that the guy we hated in high school thinks he can write on the topic of birdwatching when he hasn’t seen a bird in years, and frankly just zone out when we read something that is just boring, boring, boring. Without these three pulls, writing and argumentation in general fall flat.

In giving you this dull history lesson, though, we can see that this isn’t some faraway foreign concept. It didn’t exist in Greece and is just irrelevant today, because your influencers, your podcasters, and your frustrating article writers rely on it to make you sad or piss you off. And it can pay to start to deconstruct these factors in your head. It can certainly give you time enough to calm down before typing up a long, frustrated screed of a comment.

Salacious or Fallacious: Logical Fallacies, Internet Culture, and You

I told you that Aristotle loved writing about argumentation, writing, and debate, right? He refined what was barely invented in terms of debate. He also adored another subject: logic. Us philosophy types love logic more than tech billionaires love money. (Well, almost as much!) Logic is the study of (and presentation of) rational argumentation that relies strictly on the truth validity of the argument. The difference between logic and rhetoric is that, in logic, there are no degrees of right or wrong in an argument. It is either right or wrong.

Let’s go back to the Sophists. A big reason the Sophists are much maligned today has to do with their frequent love of manipulating people into agreeing with them, even if the argument premise is not valid, and even if the facts are not true. And we could go into an entire other post about what “true or false” are in philosophy and logic, but I would fall asleep while typing it. Formal logic was not my strongest class in my undergrad days and I try not to revisit that. . .

However, since people like Aristotle wanted to make sure that there were ethical principles and ground rules for debate, we get treated to the best (and only fun) part of formal logic: fallacies. A fallacy is an error in reasoning that tries to manipulate an argument, especially if the premise is weak or even altogether untrue. A fallacy in an argument makes it invalid, and as such, the argument itself should not be taken very seriously.

And there are quite a few fallacies out there, added over centuries by philosophers after Aristotle, but most interestingly, some of the very classic ones are still some of the most common in the digital age. Don’t believe me? Allow me to give you some very relatable examples.

Fallacies for Funzies

Let’s start with a fallacy people accuse people of, but many do not understand: the straw man. In a straw man argument, the speaker tells their interlocutor (or the person they are debating/arguing against) that the other person’s argument sucks because . . . and then makes up ridiculous ideas to tear it apart quickly, piece by piece, not even bothering to address the actual content of the argument. They misrepresent the argument made, thus twisting it from a flesh and blood argument into a straw person they can set on fire. The late Charlie Kirk and his followers were infamous for this method.

Another classic that people on the internet especially love to use is the ad hominem attack. The ad hominem, used by people since before the “your mom” joke was invented, is an argument that focuses on the character, behavior, ethics, appearance, etc. of the interlocutor, and then just makes fun of or insults these qualities, completely ignoring the person’s argument, but rather focusing on the person. If you’ve ever been in a comments section and said something different than what most are saying (especially as a woman with a picture to indicate you are a woman), you’ve likely been on the receiving end of this.

And there are so many, many juicy fallacies that I would invite you to look at on The School of Thought’s website, where they have the best and most concise definitions of all your favorite fallacies. You can even link people to which fallacy they are committing, but I am totally not saying that this is something you should do in online discourse. Nope.

Rhetoric and Logic: How They Meet and How You Should Meet Rage Bait

While rhetoric shows us the building blocks for human discourse, logic shows us the limitations we should acknowledge in terms of validity and truth of arguments, as well as general behavior. In philosophy (and elsewhere), we often refer to the principle of charity, the ethical mandate that you should behave in your discourse with others in a charitable, or kind manner. Give the person a benefit of a doubt before assuming things about them. Comportment has for centuries been a big part of determining persuasiveness, authority, and how much you even want to listen to that person. If a person is being condescending to you, even if they are saying something with which you agree, it’s not easy to take a valid argument from them without a bad taste in your mouth.

And so, rhetoric and logic, rather than being polar opposites to each other, inform each other. Rhetoric shows us the human side of discourse while logic shows us the truthful side of discourse, and those are not contrary things. Logic can help temper things when rhetoric gets a little too feisty, as it often does online.

In telling you this, I think it can be heartening to have some very basic tools to take apart what may be easily enraging you online, and pause before responding to it. To tell yourself, “Oh, this stupid meme is trying to appeal to my emotions outside of actually being real” can be a powerful way to keep your blood pressure down and start the process of disengaging with rage bait nonsense.

As a personal aside, when I took a grad school course on social media, we were told very, very clearly that, in order to make compelling content for social media in particular, it is essential to appeal to emotion, and even to divisiveness. You want to get a good harvest of reactions and engagement, and the best way to do that is by making people upset and waging war on each other in the comments section. I still think of that, several years later.

And in writing this article on rage bait, I assure you, dear reader, that I am here not only to inform you, but also to reassure myself. As a person of a certain age in the United States, I often sit at the computer and doomscroll through Facebook. At the beginning of last year, with the political (ahem) issues heating up, I found myself engaging with a lot of content that emphasized arguments about gender, racism, etc. After a certain point, I had an emotional breakdown, in large part from social media use, and had to enter a hospital to feel better.

I had forgotten what I had learned in philosophy so long ago, and what I learned in social media communication much later: that there are many people out there who want to create content specifically to piss you off, make you rage against people you don’t know, and create general chaos. It’s not right that these people do this. It’s not good. And they are not, in main, doing it because they care about these issues. They care about engagement, what sells. 

But when you equip yourself with the ability to distance yourself from the rage bait, to see it for what it is, you can slowly start to disengage. And honestly? Disengagement is the best course in terms of social media, where everyone has an opinion, and most of them are passionate, annoying, and angry.

Take care of yourself. You and the physical world around you are more important than the opinions of someone who may or may not be a bot.