rage bait

Meaning

1. Content deliberately made to provoke anger and drive engagement.
2. A post or headline designed to make people argue in the comments.

“That headline was pure rage bait, and I still clicked it.”

Where it came from

The underlying idea dates to a 2002 Usenet post describing drivers deliberately provoking each other in traffic. The compound formed later on the model of “clickbait,” spreading through the 2010s to describe outrage-driven social media content, and Oxford University Press named “rage bait” its word of the year for 2025.