Rage Farming

When we come across something online that is so outrageous that we can’t help but respond, we may be falling into the Rage Farming trap. Manipulators use the Read, Anger, Response cycle to rile us up.

They get a ton of attention from a ton of people who wouldn’t have heard of them otherwise. They use our anger to give them visibility on social media.

One political group (we don’t want to give them more attention by naming them) did just that with a tweet that said “If you can wait in line for a covid test, you can wait in line to vote.” They got almost 105 million reactions. They were trending on Twitter. They got written up in multiple newspapers. They loved it! It was a huge win for them.

Rage farmers don’t care that people hate them. They want to go viral any way they can. They get the attention, influence – and often ad revenue  – that all that attention brings.

And it’s not just political drama. Rage Farming is a manipulative trick that all types of scammers use to go viral.