Is Rage Bait Okay?

It has become the new engagement strategy for many brands. Companies bait their followers into engaging with their content around topics that cause outrage. But is this okay? Social -media strategists Talya Goldberg and Jabulile Dlamini -Qwesha share their views.

- Talya Goldberg and Jabulile Dlamini -Qwesha

In the age of ‘always online, always relevant and always aware’, rage bait has been the mainstay in online media for the past decade. Rage bait, cultural appropriation and inspiration are intertwined concepts, and they have been a constant source of debate in the media and among the ‘woke’ Twitter and Instagram masses. The old adage ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’ definitely applies to media, advertising and PR. In 2020, where we are inundated with content from media companies and brands trying to get through to consumers, it is now extremely hard to cut through the clutter, beat the algorithm and get your message heard among the noise. In its own perverse way, rage bait is a form of content pushing – it gets organic views by inciting heated discussions and online furor. An example of this is Kim Kardashian-West and the launch of her Kimono brand. Just after being launched, people were screaming ‘cultural appropriation’. She leveraged this free pub