Satyabrat Borah
Social media has perfected a single, ruthless business model: hijack as many human brains as possible for as long as possible and sell the captured attention to advertisers. The most reliable way to keep a brain glued to a screen is not joy, curiosity, or even lust. It is anger. Outrage produces the sharpest dopamine spikes, the fastest heart rate, the strongest impulse to comment, argue, share, and stay. Once the platforms discovered this neurological truth, they tuned their algorithms accordingly. Content that makes people furious spreads faster and retains users longer than any other kind. The inevitable result is a global machine whose primary fuel is human rage.
Oxford crowned “rage bait” its Word of the Year for 2025, a choice that felt less like linguistic curiosity and more like a public-health bulletin. The year before, the honor had gone to “brain rot.” Both phrases describe the same diseased ecosystem. Rage bait is any post, video, meme, or headline deliberately engineered to provoke outrage. It rarely matters whether the outrage is justified; what matters is that it is intense and immediate. A thirty-second clip can be edited, captioned, and framed in such a way that it feels like proof of the viewer’s worst fears about the world. Half-truths, decontextualized images, and outright lies all work beautifully as long as they ignite the limbic system. The algorithm notices the explosion of likes, comments, and shares, registers that this type of stimulus is exceptionally sticky, and serves more of it to more people. A vicious feedback loop is born.
The consequences reach far beyond wasted hours. Prolonged exposure to weaponized anger rewires the brain. Studies show that heavy consumers of outrage-driven content exhibit heightened anxiety, lowered empathy, and increased hostility in real life. Political polarization, once a gradual drift, now happens at the speed of a viral thread. Communities that once argued over policy now treat the other side as existential enemies. Reality itself fractures: the same event can produce two entirely incompatible versions depending on which corner of the internet one inhabits. A traffic accident becomes a religious war, a policy debate becomes genocide, a teenager’s mistake becomes evidence of civilizational collapse. Truth dies not from censorship but from suffocation under an avalanche of doctored emotion.
Adults suffer, but children are being systematically destroyed. Their still-developing brains are uniquely vulnerable to dopamine-driven feedback loops. Jonathan Haidt and others have charted the terrifying correlation: the arrival of smartphones and algorithmic feeds in the early 2010s was followed by a sudden, worldwide surge in adolescent anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide. Girls, who gravitate toward image-heavy platforms, have been hit hardest; rates of severe depression among American teenage girls roughly doubled in the decade after 2012. Boys, pulled toward rage-heavy political and gaming content, show rising hostility and disengagement from real-world relationships. The platforms know this. Internal research leaked years ago proved that Instagram was toxic to a large percentage of teenage girls, yet the business model was never changed because toxicity and profitability are, in this system, synonyms.
Responsible media operates on a fundamentally different principle. A newspaper or a reputable broadcast outlet earns revenue through subscriptions, advertising, or public funding, but its legitimacy and long-term survival depend on credibility. A journalist who repeatedly distorts reality loses readers and reputation. An editor who green-lights inflammatory fiction gets fired or sued. The incentives push toward verification, context, and proportion. When responsible outlets cover a tragedy, they provide facts, timelines, competing perspectives, and historical background. Readers may still feel anger, but it is anger grounded in reality rather than rage manufactured for clicks. The emotional response is slower, deeper, and more likely to produce constructive action than mindless lashing out.
The contrast becomes stark when the same story appears in both realms. A terrorist attack occurs. A newspaper front page carries the death toll, photographs of victims, statements from authorities, and analysis of security failures. The accompanying editorial might condemn the perpetrators and call for measured policy changes. On social media the attack is stripped of nuance within minutes. One side sees proof that an entire religion is evil; the opposing side sees proof of a conspiracy by intelligence agencies. Doctored images circulate, old videos are mislabeled as new, and within an hour millions of people are screaming past each other in comment sections. The platforms register record engagement and quietly increase ad loads.
This is not a flaw in the system; it is the system. Every major platform has experimented with dialing down the outrage amplifiers and every time the result is the same: daily active users dip, session length shrinks, and stock prices wobble. Investors punish any hint of restraint. Executives therefore face a brutal choice: moderate the feeds and watch the company’s valuation crater, or continue harvesting rage and accept the moral wreckage. So far the market has always rewarded the second option.
Yet the machinery is not invincible. Individuals retain agency at the precise point where the algorithm is weakest: the moment of personal choice. Every blocked account, every muted keyword, every conscious decision to close the app registers as a tiny vote against the rage economy. These acts feel insignificant, but they aggregate. When millions of users simultaneously refuse to reward incendiary content, the algorithm is forced to adjust. Platforms have already made small concessions when faced with sustained user backlash: reduced reach for borderline content, warning labels, demonetization of the worst offenders. These are not acts of sudden conscience; they are reactions to shifting incentives created by people reclaiming their attention.
Parents can impose even stronger leverage. Delaying smartphone ownership until high school, replacing algorithmic feeds with dumb phones, enforcing strict screen-time limits, and cultivating real-world friendships all blunt the platforms’ power. Entire schools and communities have begun coordinating these policies so that no child is singled out for opting out. The social stigma flips: the kid without the glowing rectangle becomes the one with time to read, play sports, and talk face-to-face.
Legislation is catching up. Europe’s Digital Services Act, Britain’s Online Safety Bill, and proposed laws in the United States all aim to force transparency and accountability onto the black box of algorithmic amplification. Regulators are finally asking the question that should have been asked fifteen years ago: why should a company be allowed to experiment on children’s brains without oversight? Liability shields that once protected platforms from responsibility for the content they promote are under serious review. The threat of financial penalty concentrates corporate minds wonderfully.
None of these steps will dismantle social media entirely, nor should they. The technology can connect loved ones, spread genuine knowledge, and amplify marginalized voices. The problem is not the existence of the medium but the incentives that govern it. Change those incentives and the medium changes with them. A platform rewarded for depth rather than rage, for understanding rather than polarization, would feel alien to us today, yet it is entirely possible. We simply have to decide that human flourishing is worth more than the next quarterly earnings report.
The battle matters because it determines what kind of civilization we leave behind. A society addicted to synthetic outrage is a society that cannot cooperate, cannot reason, and cannot endure. Democracies collapse when citizens perceive one another as monsters. Families fracture when every dinner table argument is pre-loaded with talking points from anonymous rage merchants. Children grow up believing that the world is a ceaseless war of all against all because that is the version of reality the algorithm has sold them.
We still possess the power to refuse the sale. Every time we choose a book over a feed, a conversation over a comment thread, a trusted news source over a viral clip, we weaken the grip of the outrage machine. The myth that we are helpless is itself a product of the same system, designed to keep us scrolling in despair. In truth, the architecture only works for as long as we agree to participate. Withdraw consent and the spell breaks.
David defeated Goliath with a single well-placed stone. Our stone is simpler still: the decision to look away from the bait. Multiply that decision by millions and the giant staggers. The war for our minds is not lost; it has barely begun. And it will be won or lost not in corporate boardrooms or parliamentary chambers alone, but in the daily, quiet choices of ordinary people who resolve to stop feeding the beast that feeds on their anger.
The future remains unwritten. We can inherit a world of perpetual synthetic rage, or we can build one where attention is once again a tool for understanding rather than a commodity to be harvested. The difference between those futures is measured in the small, cumulative acts of resistance that begin the moment someone closes the app and chooses something real instead.
