Reflection on political aspect of RAGE BAIT strategy in YouTube bloggers’ discourse
Abstract
Rage bait as a strategy of provoking negative emotions for engagement has surged in relevance amid 2025’s social media dynamics. This study addresses its political dimension, analyzing how it is perceived by the online community as opposed to existing dictionary definitions of the phrase. The research is based on a corpus of 8 YouTube videos (2024-2025, ~232 min total) by English-speaking influencers critiquing rage bait. Methods encompass using CST online tools for lemmatization of manually checked and pre-corrected transcripts (~19,929 words), AntConc for the analysis of words frequency, n-grams and collocations. The quantitative analysis is enriched by in-depth context analysis, allowing to clarify the semantics of linguistic units from the perspective of a particular blogger's vision, pay special attention to the interpretative and evaluative aspect, and determine at a deeper level, from the point of view of understanding integral text fragments, the features of the functional load of individual keywords and their semantic connections. Thus, a fragment of knowledge about rage bait as a popular communication practice in social media is modeled. The results demonstrate rage bait’s dual nature: it is mainly profit-oriented, yet it may be politically charged, with right-wing dominating ideologies. This politically oriented rage bait fosters stereotyping of social groups and ideological polarization by using dehumanization of women, Black people, and minorities. However, it can also be used in building personal brands for politicians. The politically oriented rage bait strategy creates a specific trap: the ragebater benefits from any outcome - speaking out against their statements supports their dissemination, a lack of reaction can be perceived as tacit agreement with the essence of the messages and support for discriminatory ideas. For this reason, it is the politically oriented rage bait that receives the most negative assessment in the discussions.