The ‘angertainment’ trap: Why you can’t stop clicking on things that make you mad
“Angertainers” are exploiting the human instinct to seek threat – and social media’s love of outrage – to divide society rather than lift it, argues a communications expert. Is it time “rage bait” came with a warning label?
“This is a BIG win in the culture war for America,” a social media influencer told her millions of followers last August, celebrating the decision of a restaurant chain to abandon plans to simplify its logo.
A logo change could destroy America? Now that’s an idea you wouldn’t have heard a few years ago. But in it, we can dissect all the ugly parts of a beast that has become the dominant political force of our time: we are living deep in an era of manufactured outrage.
A mainstay of highway rest stops in the American South, the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel has struggled in recent years with declining patronage. In order to turn things around it announced a refresh of its rustic, old-timey brand: dropping a decades-old drawing of a character known as Uncle Herschel sitting on a wooden chair and updating “Cracker Barrel” to a clearer font.
The internet lost its mind, as if the chain had declared it was closing its doors to redneck truckers and instead recruiting Hillary Clinton to sell vegan rainbow kitty litter for trans youths identifying as feline.
“Cracker Barrel CEO should face charges for this crime against humanity,” tweeted End Wokeness, with no hint of hyperbole. “A Christian cannot give their money to Cracker Barrel,” implored another. Right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson chimed in with “I will not eat at Cracker Barrel again until the Woke CEO resigns!“, echoing verbatim scores of other users across X.
In the MAGA outrage machine’s telling, the modernising of the logo was destroying everything virtuous and traditional about America, sacrificed on the altar of diversity, inclusion, pride and other liberal city values. And so it sprang into action: flipping the switch on a sophisticated web of internet influencers, social media creators and right-wing media outlets to provoke a coordinated hysteria about something that, let’s be frank, was a storm in a Stanley mug.
Within days, Cracker Barrel had lost $153 million in market value, reversed course on the logo, deleted the Pride page from its website and made a grovelling phone call to the White House thanking President Trump for his “feedback”. The outrage machine had won a complete victory.
Cracker Barrel is no bastion of “woke” lefty ideals: as late as the 1990s, the company still had an official policy to fire anyone who failed to demonstrate “normal heterosexual values”. In the 2000s, it had to pay out millions in lawsuits to black customers and staff. But to focus on the subject matter of this culture war flashpoint is to miss the point. Outbursts like these aren’t spontaneous. This was merely the latest flexing of a new form of cultural and political power – by manufacturing and then weaponising outrage through “angertainment”.
Outrage, in a traditional setting, is a good thing. As social creatures, we are built to respond when we witness an injustice, a lie, an act of cruelty. Our reaction is what keeps society safe from those things, so our brains reward it. Our political systems are – rightly – set up to be sensitive to outrage. Step outside the bounds of what society reasonably expects and you draw the ire of the masses, get booted out of office or face protests and media meltdown.
But like we do with all good drugs, we chase that high. We begin to seek out opportunities for outrage to get our next dopamine hit, and social media provides us these on a platter.
Our brains can’t distinguish between threats from woolly mammoths and threats from logo changes. Our brains can’t understand whether that rage you feel is because your village is being invaded by Vikings or because your social media feed is being invaded by political cartoons.
Social media allows vested interests to easily exploit this, until the internet simply yells loudly in unison and all proportion is lost. Ignore the merits of any topic and instead make it an emotional culture war issue, and these systems go into overdrive. Unleash emotive internet hysteria and the sheer volume overwhelms the sensors of public opinion.
This is exactly what happened in 2023 during the Voice to Parliament referendum, when hysteria, outrage and culture war noise drowned out the usual forces of opinion-forming. Change became impossible under the weight of a torrent of manufactured social media noise. Despite Australia’s long history of failed referenda, in early 2023 there was every reason to be confident the Voice to Parliament would pass: a clear majority of Australians supported the notion. It looked to be a lay-down misère.
But by October, only 40 per cent of Australians voted yes. How did public
opinion turn so quickly, so completely, in such a short time? As the conservative MP Barnaby Joyce put it at the time, “There’s a new type of politics in Australia, and it’s a little bit Trumpian.”
He wasn’t wrong. The Australian propaganda machine Advance had flown over consultants from MAGA and Christian fundamentalist groups to advise on strategy. It seemed as if, overnight, they’d turned on the taps of outrage. It was something never seen on a large scale in Australia before – a torrent of hysterical disinformation cascading down social media feeds.
The fear-based emotive narratives were nothing new – they were plucked from vintage grievance files: “they’ll take our jobs, they’ll take our land, they’ll take our freedom!” – but the unrelenting angry noise, tugging emotional heartstrings, fired at muzzle velocity across the internet and taking full advantage of the algorithms that favour all three: this was the novel realisation of angertainment in Australia. It wouldn’t sound strange to Americans, or Ukrainians or Filipinos, now used to living under the weight of cascading online misinformation, but for Australians, the experience was deeply unsettling. Many feared a new political reality had set in: you don’t have to win the argument when you have noise.
When Los Angeleños faced unprecedented fires that destroyed entire suburbs in 2025, the angertainment machine went into action. It assailed outrage at anything but the main culprit (climate change) blaming, variously: “far-left woke policies”; “trying to protect a tiny little fish called a smelt”; “indoctrinating our children in child mutilation”, along with Native Americans wanting some of their river back to catch salmon, a fire department donating surplus supplies to Ukraine, and hiring based on DEI instead of muscularity.
Yes, it’s funny. But look at the targets they attacked. The smelt? Environmental regulations. The salmon? Indigenous programs. The DEI initiatives? Preventing discrimination. The surplus supplies? Support for Ukraine and opposition to Putin. These are the same targets of MAGA’s Project 2025 platform.
Starting to make sense yet?
We are assaulted with so much information these days that only the most entertaining and outrageous things cut through, and unfortunately, the first people to cotton on to this were the jesters, the jerks and the jackals. You may have seen one behind the historic oak desk in the White House Oval Office. These are the angertainers: firebrand bigots, social media creators, manosphere podcasters, outrage influencers – angry clowns that have taken over the court of public opinion.
Big Tech incentivises their content, and the significance of these perverse rewards is immense – users will rush to create the most ragey and fringy content they can to succeed on the platform algorithms – even when they don’t necessarily believe it themselves. In trying to control the attention economy, those making the algorithms have instead created something far worse: an outrage economy.
We have given the keys of society over to the contrarians and the haters and the mystics, all of whom will find more of an audience refuting an orthodoxy than by endorsing it. As a result, young men are adopting the attitudes of their sexist old grandpas, and young women are following health advice that will kill them. Surveys in several European countries show a recent sharp increase to more than one in five males aged 15-24 who agree that “a woman’s place is in the home”. This is why vaccination rates are declining: qualified experts will tell you they work, but the algorithm will serve you a crunchy wellness mumfluencer vouching for sunlight as an alternative.
It has become a business strategy, and a political strategy, to capitalise on a system that rewards provocation. This cynical new entrepreneurialism is so pervasive that the Oxford Dictionary named “rage bait” its 2025 word of the year.
But we are not dead yet – there is still hope for dismantling the outrage machine. We will not find a silver bullet, so instead we need to deploy a patchwork quilt of solutions. Some are social. Some are cultural. Some are political. Some are technical. All are necessary.
If we could choose only one antidote, it would be to fix the platforms that incentivise and drive angertainment. We have already put our entire information and media ecosystems on platforms wholly unsuitable – our town square in the UFC octagon, with an audience given amphetamines and baseball bats – so we need to take it back.
This cynical new entrepreneurialism is so pervasive that the Oxford Dictionary named ‘rage bait’ its 2025 word of the year.
Healthcare companies have a legal duty of care to not harm patients. Theatres have a legal duty of care to put in fire safety measures. Theme park operators have a duty of care to not build rollercoasters that crash and burn. Why should social media platforms be exempt from this?
Fixing our feeds – like giving us control over our own algorithms, and taking that power away from Big Tech – will take an enormous amount of political will. For now, we are stuck with social media design as it is, so we also need solutions that work within it.
Firstly, we need to acknowledge what we can’t change. This is where a lot of the current commentary goes awry: if the problem is that we’re getting too worked up, then obviously the solution is to tone things down. Be less emotional.
There are ways to help do this, and we should try. But angertainment works because we are hardwired to be emotional, inflamed, high-temperature. We are hardwired to form groups and then hate the other groups. So what emotions should we be invoking to defeat divisive internet hate?
Empathy is the emotional antidote to hate. Outrage culture thrives by flattening complex human beings into one-dimensional avatars of an opposing group. If we are to counter this, we need to reanimate the objects of our disagreements into three-dimensional humans.
We can do this by always including the context of our opinions, through our personal experiences (“I saw how unhappy this kid was and how much their transition helped their mental health … that’s why I am now in favour of gender-affirming care”). Personal stories highlight the similarities we share, rather than zeroing in on differences, as angertainment does.
We also need to find ways to dial down the amplification of things that do the opposite. Social media is built to have us engage, so we need to reclaim our ability to ignore. One key way to do so is to simply teach people about social media’s design so they are able to recognise rage bait when they see it and not fall for it. Putting warning labels on social media, like we do on junk food, might also help us snack on it safely.
And if our ideas are to compete there, we need a vibe shift. Right-wing populists are ascendant globally because they speak social media fluently, with narratives of grievance and vilification. It’s the opposite of the perfectly curated and coiffed “on message” politician. Real life is unpolished, emotional and unscripted. Like Trump is. They don’t merely have all the best songs, they are the only ones who’ve figured out how to use the jukebox.
But while their songs may be catchy, they are also pure pop. The angertainers’ blueprint for the future is anaemic. It destroys much and builds nothing: cancel this person, ban this book, drown out this reform. Rage is a powerful fuel but does not burn efficiently.
The angertainers’ blueprint for the future is anaemic. It destroys much and builds nothing.
We can defeat angertainment, the destroyer of ideas, in kind: through big ideas able to incite us in equal proportion. This is the US Democrats’ current failing: they see Trump’s success and think they can beat it by emulating his style while keeping their substance unchanged. We need both. We can defeat those trying to drag us back into the past with a compelling vision of the future. Radical idea: if we want to stop the politics of grievance, maybe we should start by fixing those grievances.
Fix economic inequalities and the lure of angertainment evaporates. The ladder has been pulled up behind those who climbed it, and those on the roof now shout down to the masses below in angry internet prose. To defeat angertainment, we need to lower the ladder back down.
Will the angertainers do this? Of course not. A movement that has succeeded by drawing from the well of resentment, caused by economic grievances, is not in any way incentivised to fix them. May as well ask a hungry labrador to engineer a solution to keep the top of the dogfood bag securely closed.
That means it’s up to you and me.
Angertainment: How Social Media Outrage Ruined Everything, by Ed Coper (Summit Books, $37), is out May 26. Coper is appearing at Gleebooks, Glebe on May 26, ANU Canberra on June 23, and The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on June 24.
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