on passionate online reactions

Social media itself has become this unfiltered collection of human reactions that became a lucrative pool of data that has been used against us. Since platforms use reach and engagement as the measurement of clout, these are used to determine where money should flow. Influencing has become the major tool to achieve virality to collect views, reactions, clicks, and comments. These raw, terribly human reactions became the fuel that sets the tone for online engagement in a severely predatory form of human interactions.

Rage-baiting is a more aggressive form of clickbait. With clickbait, it only becomes a hook-line-and-sinker approach to reel people in towards your content and garner clicks and views. The content itself has a chance to not align with what the actual clickbait title says, making it more of a "gotcha" moment. Rage-baiting is a different thing. The title is meant to reel people into a more provocative content that is meant to either attack a target demographic and create discord. This becomes an online pot-stirrer where passionate verbiage is king. It is solely meant to rile up the emotions of the target audience and expect a lot of engagement that will flood the poster's notifications and DMs. It is an emotionally manipulative tactic to call attention to one's post.

I just hate how effective it is. I am frustrated that I still fall for it, at least before I catch myself drafting a response for a post, where I will realize how stupid I sound and even more stupid to think that a stupid post got under my skin to feel aggravated to a point of actually taking it seriously. I have tried to manifest a type of emotional boundary where all feelings of rage become an internalized frustration upon realizing that the post was made with an intent to just cause online chaos. At the end of the day, the one who rage-baits is also the one who's laughing in the end. It feels like there is no type of retribution that happens when a terribly irresponsible post is made online without a second thought of how it will affect people. At its very basic sense, which is also the very thing that annoys me, is that this is the type of monkey-brained activity that is also considered to be protected by free speech unless it falls under defamation or deliberate misinformation.

Perhaps, in a deeper sense, it gets under my skin to think that actual living, breathing, thinking people actually decide to do such things. The freedom of expression itself is always interpreted as being absolved from the responsibility of expression. It is solipsistic at worst to think that this method of unfiltered irresponsible posting is what is being exploited in social media. The immorality that surrounds this activity revolves around your own social responsibility as a human to cut through the supposed human flourishing because at its core, rage-baiting does not offer any valid criticism that attempts to pose a solution or open a discussion on improving the things that they dislike, even at least in an objective manner. This is why I focus on passionate reactions where these are plainly knee-jerk responses to an issue. It does not add anything to the discussion. In cases where there isn't an intention to rage-bait, there are situations where passionate reactions are themselves a form of self-validation. It is almost a narcissistic attempt to express one's righteousness because it is only meant to highlight one's experiences and others can just shut up.

In the same vein, both instances do not add anything to society but unwanted noise. These are the cacophony of unintelligible haha and angry reactions that are being weaponized by the new media.