This isn't anything new, it was abundantly clear after Facebook removed their fact checking team during covid that the priority was engagement over everything else, and rage bait is exactly that.
I will call out the ABC here for taking a lot of the boots on the ground work that Tom Tanuki - independent journo (https://youtube.com/@tomtanuki) has done with these far right slopaganda mills, slicing off the prior recognition and pretending it's a big new problem they just found. While a bit of this is new... Is it that new? Is this report that detailed? Hmmmmm
Can't they just do it with AI ?
Now people understand why Suckerberg is called Suckerberg.
Those greedy billionaires also keep on having ties to right wing nuts. Let's not forget Melon Usk with his suspicious right-arm-raising gestures (having done so twice, which is quite strange when you do the same gesture twice in a row - I mean there can be no doubt about this if you do it twice; twice is an accident?).
When will people learn that rage bait content thrives thanks to people who are so delicate and emotional that they get unhealthily enraged at such content?
Stop raging on the internet and the rage bait content will disappear overnight.
Stop buying oil and the climate will get better overnight.
It’s all on the consumers.
The irony here is that ABC is the platfrom doing the rage-baiting.
Especially before elections, it feels like they rewards people for being toxic
Facebook is still big in my country, Lithuania, and both rage-bait and other type of fringe content is rampant, and even worse after fact-checking was removed. It is wild, and with some outside actors (specific country that shall not be named) it is a big problem with political and social effects being felt IRL.
Clickbait. Title makes it sound like they pay them directly to promote the platform, but they get paid through facebook content monetisation program
So they do directly pay them?
Not Clickbait.
If you provide both:
a) a service to earn money from content
b) an algo promoting those videos
then yes, IMHO they pay them directly for the content produced.
Social media platforms have been paying out for attention seeking behaviour for a long time now. It’s why every YouTube video now has the same lame shocked face, red arrows, and clickbait title. It’s why assholes film themselves intentionally pissing people off for TikTok. It’s a whole category called nuisance tubing.
I remember during COVID I saw a number of YouTubers swing from producing normal content into conspiracy shit. Their views ballooned. I saw a nasty feedback loop where the more controversial content received more engagement, hence more ad revenue, leading to more of it being produced.
These platforms are actively degenerating society; there’s a reason the CCP is keeping tight control and reportedly rebalancing things to promote educational creators on China’s.
Indeed. What I noticed is that the quality of the videos went down on youtube in the last 3 years. Now, the quality was never as great as it used to be anyway, but Google changed various things that made youtube worse. They are slowly killing off youtube without realising it.
FB is built on rage bait, what else do they have beside cute videos?
Horrible sympathy and religion bait like "I bet nobody will upvote this poor sick child with one leg, won't you? 1 amen = 1 prayer!"
How is this any different than traditional media? Cable news creates fake problems and controversy constantly, and pay their news anchors well to do so.
In return, many companies that rely on these problems, turn around and advertise on these networks.
Social media is just following the same strategy.
What are you trying to say? That Facebook should be excused because others also behave badly?
Otherwise, we can dislike both things and it adds nothing to say "but why aren't your talking about the other thing instead". And for what it's worth, there is a pretty clear difference between the journalistic standards of FB bait and of the legacy media.
Ragebait is what FB runs on. A lot of these people do not even believe what they say. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
FB and IG reels both. Twitter gets a lot of rightfully owed criticism about it's fair share but its always weird to me seeing people slam twitter then go right on to IG or some other meta owned app as if its significantly different.
Is it ethical wrong in this case, to wish those persons to get beaten up one day, by one of the people where they fueled their hate (who do take it out on other people for real)? So they reap what they sow?
Understandable but wrong.