Techniques · Digital-era

Rage farming

Deliberately posting provocative or offensive content to generate angry responses, because the anger drives engagement, and the engagement drives reach and revenue.

Family Digital-era First documented 2021 Exploits Negativity bias, Moral outrage amplification Related fallacy Appeal to emotion
How it works

Anger spreads faster than any other emotion online, and platforms rank by spread. Rage farming is the industrialization of that fact: a post designed to be objectionable draws furious replies, quote-posts, and shares from people who mean to condemn it, and each of those is counted by the system as engagement. The condemnation is the amplification. The farmer's audience grows, the advertising revenue follows, and the political version wins attention it could not earn by argument.

Research on moralized content found that each moral-emotional word in a post increased its spread, and that posts attacking an out-group were shared far more than posts praising an in-group. The device is the appeal to outrage rebuilt for a ranking system. Exploits Negativity Bias and Moral Outrage Amplification.

Historical examples

2017–2021 · research

Brady and colleagues found in 2017 that the presence of moral-emotional words in political posts increased their diffusion by about 20 percent per word. Rathje, Van Bavel, and van der Linden found in 2021 that posts about political out-groups were shared roughly twice as often as posts about in-groups, and that out-group animosity was the strongest predictor of engagement they measured. Together the studies describe the device's fuel.

Brady, William J., et al. "Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks." PNAS 114, no. 28 (2017): 7313–7318; Rathje, Steve, Jay J. Van Bavel, and Sander van der Linden. "Out-Group Animosity Drives Engagement on Social Media." PNAS 118, no. 26 (2021): e2024292118. Source

2021 · platform disclosures

Internal documents disclosed by the former Facebook employee Frances Haugen in 2021 showed that the company's 2018 ranking change, which weighted comments and reactions more heavily, had increased the reach of divisive and angry content, that the company's researchers had documented the effect, and that publishers and political parties had told the company they were producing angrier content to keep up.

Hagey, Keach, and Jeff Horwitz. "Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead." The Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2021 (The Facebook Files).

In advertising and commerce

2020s · creator economy

Creators on platforms that pay for engagement have described, in interviews and in their own videos, posting deliberately wrong cooking, parenting, or fitness advice because the correction replies multiply their reach. Platform payment programs tied to engagement made the practice a documented income strategy, and several platforms have since adjusted their formulas.

Lorenz, Taylor. Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Classroom prompt

Find a post that made many people angry. Look at how it spread. How many of the shares came from people who agreed with it, and how many from people condemning it?

In the wild

Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.

1
The account posts "pineapple on pizza is a war crime, and so is everything your generation likes," gets 40,000 furious replies, and gains 10,000 followers by morning.

What to notice. A provocation posted for the anger it will farm; the condemnation is the growth.

2
The columnist's most-read pieces are the ones the most people share to denounce; her editor asks for more like them.

What to notice. Outrage cultivated as a business model because the ranking rewards it.

3
The video gives deliberately wrong advice; the creator later admits the errors were "for the comments."

What to notice. Provocation by error, farmed for the correction replies that spread it.

Sources

  1. Rathje, Steve, Jay J. Van Bavel, and Sander van der Linden. "Out-Group Animosity Drives Engagement on Social Media." PNAS 118, no. 26 (2021): e2024292118. doi:10.1073/pnas.2024292118
  2. Brady, William J., et al. "Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks." PNAS 114, no. 28 (2017): 7313–7318. doi:10.1073/pnas.1618923114
  3. Hagey, Keach, and Jeff Horwitz. "Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead." The Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2021.