“Rage Bait” May Be The Word Of The Year, But Free Speech Remains The Target

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

George Bernard Shaw famously observed that “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.” It appears, however, that this chasm has finally been overcome by the common dialect of rage. The new word of the year was announced this week by the Oxford University Press and it is tragically apt: “rage bait.”

First used in 2002, the new word is defined 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.”

The choice is certainly apropos of what I called in my recent book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.” Rage is a curious emotion. It is the ultimate release. It allows you to do things and say things that you would not otherwise do or say. That is why it is addictive and contagious.

Rage, however, can also be a license not just to rave but to regulate.

The key to rage is that it is entirely subjective and relative. If you agree with a speaker, it is righteous. If you disagree, it is dangerous.

That relativism was evident in Oxford’s own press release on the selection of the word. 

Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, associated the term with “manipulation tactics we can be drawn into online.”

He slammed “internet culture” for “hijacking and influencing our emotions.”

Grathwohl warned that it is an extension of what is called “rage-farming… to manipulate reactions and to build anger and engagement over time by seeding content with rage bait, particularly in the form of deliberate misinformation of conspiracy theory-based material.”

If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the “here, here” grunts of the British censors.

Great Britain and other European countries have eviscerated free speech through criminalization and regulation for decades. The Internet is a particular obsession of the anti-free speech movement. The greatest single invention since the printing press, the Internet is a threat to countries and groups that want to control speech.

The new scourge is hidden “algorithms” that elevate certain postings. While liberals like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) have called for social media companies to use algorithms to encourage people to choose better books, the left accuses these companies of fueling divisions but creating forums for views that it considers “disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation.”

The difficulty is distinguishing content-based bias in algorithms (which is rightfully condemned) from systems that simply elevate more popular posts. If social media is merely favoring more popular speech, the problem with critics is not with the bait but their own failure to attract nibbles from those surfing the web.

The fact is that these companies profit from traffic and favor posts that customers are most interested in reading. That drives activists to distraction because they believe their views are healthier and superior for citizens to discuss.

These are really calls for “enlightened algorithms” to favor truth, as defined by governments and supporting experts. That is not “hijacking” but liberating; it is not “rage bait” but reasoned debate. It is that easy.

Any disliked image or view can be deemed rage bait. The same week that Oxford was choosing rage bait, there was another story of how free speech is in a free fall in the United Kingdom.

Jon Richelieu-Booth told the Yorkshire Post that he was arrested for posting a picture on the networking site LinkedIn of himself holding a shotgun at a friend’s homestead in Florida. West Yorkshire Police allegedly warned him about the post and told him to be “careful” about what he says online and “how it makes people feel.” He was later arrested and spent months in the criminal justice system before the case was dropped.

It is an all-too-familiar story for those of us who have documented the decline of free speech in the UK.

The British police have arrested people for silently praying in public and a man was convicted for “toxic ideologies,” literal thought crimes.

The Times of London reported that police are making around 12,000 arrests per year over online posts.

Rage rhetoric has been with us since humans first learned to speak. The danger of rage rhetoric is rarely the rhetoric itself. It is the use of rage rhetoric by the government and others to silence citizens.

It is easy to say that certain postings are “bait” for rage. It is more difficult to agree on what rage is. While the left will denounce statements of Donald Trump as rage bait, they rarely object to such rhetoric from Hillary Clinton or Jasmine Crockett. The same is often true on the right. Each side views its own postings as reasoned debate and the other side’s as rage bait.

No one is being “hijacked” on the Internet. They are choosing their sources, and many create siloes or echo chambers. It is a common feature of “an age of rage.”

Oxford is clearly correct in the selection of a word that captures the age. However, it also captures the use of rage to rationalize censorship by treating viewpoints as harmful lures for the unsuspecting, unwashed masses. That desire to regulate speech is also often driven by rage, but it is embraced as reason.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of the best-selling book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”