Congratulations, You’re Employed!

Did you hear about that one girl on TikTok who did her skincare by just not washing her face? People called her the Caveman Skincare Girl. Eventually, she had an unusual light green layer on her face that people were calling mold and saying she was making herself sicker. Caveman Girl kept posting TikToks of her working out and doing other everyday things with her face getting more and more “moldy.” Then, it came out that she was actually faking it and rage-baiting people the whole time. If you didn’t hear about that, congratulations, you’re employed. 

In all seriousness, there’s a common pattern on the Internet where someone does something borderline outrageous and then stands on their hill while the comment sections and other TikTokers respond with tomatoes and disbelief. After all, who else remembers Scar Girl a few years prior and her ridiculous fake scar? 

It’s evident that, as people, we can’t help but fall for rage-bait tactics like these. There are a variety of ways to rage bait and trigger a comment section into hurling insults and corrections. hat’s how the rage baiter usually wins. Our reaction is what the rage baiter wants after all.  

Then there’s another part to it where we, as the audience, can’t tell if the rage-baiting post is sincere or satire. With the Caveman Skincare Girl, it was unclear at first if the girl was purposefully doing it or just making a joke and running with it. There’s a lot of content on TikTok and other social media platforms where people parody extreme or bizarre behavior. Sometimes it can be easy to spot, with cues like clear overexertion of behavior or a tag that says satire in the caption. But then the lines get blurred when we lose those visual cues, and we’re left to decide if the video is a trap or a parody.

And the traps work. When we scroll and come across rage-baiting content, our brains are triggered to react, comment, and share the content – to speak up and say something as a form of justice. The content is meant to trigger our fight instincts, and so we engage with rage bait because our brains believe it's how we can fight back. But again, that’s what the rage baiter wants. 

It's how extreme political content gets spread across platforms like Twitter and TikTok. The algorithms will pick up on people engaging with the content – whether it’s out of rage or agreement – and amplify even more to keep people engaged on their platforms. But rage bait doesn’t have to be political anymore. Now people just do something deemed stupid or bizarre and can rally thousands, if not millions, to engage and throw virtual rotten tomatoes. 

And we keep seeing it because it keeps working. People commented on the Caveman Skincare girl that they wouldn’t be surprised if she comes out with a skincare collaboration in a week. Online, our attention is currency. And people are willing to do whatever it takes to grab our attention, from entertaining a small lie to an inflammatory political commentary. In our increasingly late-stage capitalistic society, people are unafraid to rage-bait for the sake of money. If there's a profit, there's a will. 

Today, to combat rage-baiting content, the simplest way is to just scroll away and not engage. Sometimes it is easier said than done, but our engagement is valuable, and we need to keep it valuable. The algorithms promote what we want to see, and the true way to fight back is to give our attention to what we value, not what we are told to value. Next time you see something that elicits an angry response, just scroll away or hit block. You are in control of your own attention; don’t let someone else take that away from you.