2025 is coming to a close, and the Oxford Word of the Year is “rage bait”. They define it as: “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”.
We’re becoming increasingly aware of how our Internet diets are designed to make us unhappy, but this has been happening for some time.
Let’s take a look at a case study. In 2018, Her.ie posted an article to Facebook entitled “Bringing home the bacon and similar phrases to be ‘banned’ as they’re offensive to vegans”.
As I write this in the final days of 2025 as an intrepid citizen journalist, I await the banging on the door that will accompany the arrival of An Garda Síochána who will clap me in irons for my use of the phrase “bringing home the bacon”. We all remember those early days of the ban, when the people we loved were censured as they came home from work and innocently told their families that they had successfully brought home the bacon for another day. The children had been trained at school to report their parents for their language crimes.
I’m aware of my impending legal woes for discussing this offensive phrase, but I want to talk about rage bait. And this is one of the earliest times I can remember realizing how fucked we all were.
![A drawing of some bacon on a yellow circular background. Written on the page is "Bringing home the [REDACTED]"](https://corawrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Bringing-home-the-REDACTED-1024x1024.png)
Let’s look at the title of the article again: “Bringing home the bacon and similar phrases to be ‘banned’ as they’re offensive to vegans”. It’s pretty shocking. The phrase is “to be ‘banned’”, which implies that the banning has been decided. It’s happening.
But which vegans made this call to outlaw “bringing home the bacon”? And what was their authority? How will it be enforced? Incidentally, this would all make a great Dead Kennedys song.
According to the article, this all-powerful vegan mafia was headed by an academic, Dr Shareena Hamzah of Swansea University, who basically was part of a group which asked people to rephrase things like “take the bull by the horns” so that people might consider how embedded violence against animals is in our language. She wrote about this in an article for The Conversation. Her.ie, to its (only) credit, links to this article in their own one.
Let’s read it. Let’s take a look at her rabid calls to outlaw phrases which are cruel to animals:
“It may very well be that down the line powerful meat metaphors are eschewed.”
“However, that is not to say that meaty descriptions will be done away with immediately – after all, it can take language a long time to change. And who is to say that even those who choose a vegan or vegetarian diet even want to do away with the meaty descriptions? It is interesting to note that a range of vegetarian burgers have been made to “bleed” like real meat.”
OK, so, what she actually says, and I recommend reading the article, is that language might change as people become more aware of veganism and how meat consumption impacts the environment and the human body.
Now, what Her.ie said to its audience is that Dr Hamzah, along with a crack team of vegans and the ghoulish PETA, were about to make one of the most momentous shifts in free speech in history, and people were about to be forced to stop using phrases that might imply cruelty to animals.
In 2018 on Facebook, I watched, bemused and then frustrated, as people I previously considered to be fairly savvy chowed down on the bait, commenting on or sharing the article.
“Fuckin ridiculous, can’t believe what the vegans are up to now”
“I’m going to eat five burgers now cos fuck this [string of laughing-crying emojis]”
Her.ie, which we then innocently still saw as a somewhat reputable news outlet, raked in engagement and therefore profit. Idiots everywhere worried that their beloved “bringing home the bacon” phrase would soon be wrested from their thirsty vocabularies. Some, presumably, ate more le epic bacon in order to protect free speech. I’d love to see the stats on how many Ron Swanson gifs were deployed.
All because one journalist (and I wouldn’t give Her.ie the credit of saying that they broke this story) somehow found themselves reading an academic article and saw a way to get their editor off their back for another thirty minutes.
In the intervening years, Her.ie devolved further and became essentially an advertising system for Penneys. There was a solid three years where the journalism amounted to: “You can now buy a mug of Chip from Beauty and the Beast. Umm, where do I sign up? Thank you Penneys!”
Anyway, now it’s 2025. Rage bait abounds.
Sydney Sweeney’s body became the unlikely site of a political battle, as weird MAGA people declared her breasts “the end of woke”, accusing the left of being upset by her femininity. Nobody is sure why this happened. Maybe one of the millions of monkeys on millions of typewriters on X said something about it, then Fox News covered the tweet, and now the left are being accused of being upset.
That’s how news is made now. Someone who may not exist says something on the Internet, someone replies to it, and then Fox News covers it and pays an actual person to come discuss it on tv, and suddenly there are articles that Sydney Sweeney’s breasts are the “end of woke”.
Sweeney then does a “jinnz” (“jeans” in Sydney-speak”) ad which has some thinly veiled white supremacy (“whaaat siprem’cy” in Sydney-speak, presumably), and we rise to the bait and discuss it endlessly, and now we’re actually mad at Sydney Sweeney when it’s a lot healthier to ignore her. Of course, if we had ignored it, it wouldn’t matter because someone somewhere would still have tweeted about it and then Fox News could have covered the outrage anyway.
Bot accounts flood r/AmITheAsshole and other subreddits with fake stories they made on ChatGPT which cause the commentariat to dissolve in fits of horror. We are served a diet of our favourite strawmen, confirming our favourite prejudices. Fatphobes’ jaws drop as they read a fake story where a fat bridesmaid demands the bride pay her because her dress was uncomfortable, even though she insisted she was four sizes smaller than she really is! Men’s rights activists simmer with rage as they read a fake story where our reasonable male protagonist is accused by his wife of being abusive because he forgot their anniversary! Feminists feel that all-too-familiar red wave as they read a fake story where a teenage girl asks if her boyfriend is right that she would only be deserving of love if she gets a boob job.
All of our beliefs are confirmed, and we feel that tug in our stomachs that always accompanies those moments on the Internet when we feel like there’s no way things could get any worse. The account that posted the fake Reddit story now has enough Reddit clout to be sold as a promotional bot to a beauty company who wants to trick r/MakeUpAddiction users into buying something, or used as part of some evil astroturfing campaign paid for by a Hollywood domestic abuser.
Content mills used to churn out unrealistic cooking videos, but now they churn out utterly implausible or messy tutorials which enrage their viewers. A waffle is covered in marshmallows before being burned. A disembodied hand pours paint on a cake. Someone puts a fork in a microwave and, when it comes out, it’s a brownie. The content mills doesn’t care if children put forks in microwaves as a result. What they want is your attention and anger.
Artificial intelligence slop and just regular low intelligence slop floods Instagram reels and, presumably, TikTok (I wouldn’t know, I already have enough shit that keeps me tethered to my phone). We’ve stopped calling things vlogs or skits – it’s all just content. The most that we can say with certainty is that it is a piece of media, a thing, content.
One of the most irritating types of content that has emerged is someone filming themselves dancing in the audience at a concert, then posting it on TikTok/wherever. They caption it, saying something like “not me being bullied by a stranger at the Charli XCX show”, zooming in on some randomer behind the dancing person who looks unhappy or annoyed. Maybe the person has a resting bitch face. Maybe the person is tired of people in front of them blocking their view with a fucking phone. Maybe the person is extra tired of this when the person isn’t even filming the artist, but instead filming themselves dancing, and now the person is in the background of this video. The video is uploaded, users flood the comments, accusing the background woman of not being “a girl’s girl” or accusing the TikToker of being a brainless attention seeker who is deserving of hatred from fellow audience members. All of this attention, good and bad, gives this TikToker their much needed attention (which is now currency) and they will now gain followers or be favoured by the algorithm. The woman in the background is collateral damage.
It infuriates me. One, it infuriates me that people do this at events. Two, it infuriates me that people are stupid enough not to see through this. Three, it infuriates me that it infuriates me. I have given away my emotions, knowingly, for a tech company to make a profit. I have contributed to a culture which increasingly diminishes our ability to distinguish stunts from reality.
A lyric from Rent often occurs to me. It’s about as subtle as a brick, but it made my teenage brain explode when I first heard it.
The characters, Mark and Roger, are briefly abandoning their more bohemian lifestyles in favour of stability. “So I own not a notion/I escape and ape content/I don’t own emotion/I rent!” It was resonant to me, how the concept of ownership is applied to one’s emotions.
That’s what comes to mind when I think of how it seems we are unwillingly, and often unwittingly, selling our emotions. Unlike Mark and Roger, who feel inauthentic and as if they don’t really feel how they do, we own our emotions. But we squander these emotions and the energy behind them , often in the service of deep political division, to line the pockets of the very billionaires who have inspired this outrage in us.
But what can we realistically do? We can’t stop the outrage machine because, as I’ve said, Musk’s shitfarm X can always manufacture some outrage to serve the slop media so that they can make a story out of something. And even if we stop being outraged, some of our friends are gullible and genuinely thought that vegans were going to ban the phrase “bringing home the bacon”, therefore it’s fighting a losing battle to try to stop people getting riled up by stuff that they read online.
What I think we can do is cease contributing to what we have decided to term “discourse”. If it’s stupid, let it be stupid. Over there.
Of course, there is value to discussion, to pushing back if someone says something out of line. But pick your battles. At this stage, I try only to discuss things with people whom I believe are arguing in good faith, and whom I know to be actual humans. Don’t spoon-feed your best shit to a bot so that it can train itself to be even more offensive.
Try to disconnect from your favourite sources of rage. Leave any subreddit that causes your heart rate to rise. Stop watching reels that are stupid. If you ever feel the need to comment, write the comment, then erase it and move on with your day. Your anger has power that you can use, don’t give it up for free to some freak billionaire who probably hunts human for sport.
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