There’s a bleak sort of poetry in Oxford University Press naming “rage bait” as its Word of the Year for 2025. A dictionary is supposed to reflect culture, not shape it.
Yet here we are, with one of the world’s most respected linguistic institutions confirming what Malaysian marketers have felt in their bones for years: anger drives clicks because anger keeps people scrolling.
But underneath the headline is something more valuable for brands and agencies — a warning, a mirror, and oddly enough, an opportunity.
The Age of Outrage — and the Algorithms That Feed It
Oxford defines “rage bait” as content “deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage… typically posted to increase traffic or engagement.”
Simple enough. But the story lives in why rage bait has risen to the top of the global lexicon.
Casper Grathwohl, head of OUP’s languages division, put it well: the surge of such terms “reveals how digital platforms are reshaping our thinking and behaviour.”
Notice the phrasing: not shaping our feeds, but shaping us.
In today’s algorithmic economy, outrage isn’t a glitch — it’s a feature.
Every angry share, quote-tweet, and WhatsApp forward is treated as proof of relevance.
Outrage is the currency that social platforms quietly bank on because it extends session time and fuels the machine.
And marketers, willingly or not, often get dragged into that current.
When 30,000 people vote in three days for a word that essentially means “content engineered to upset you,” it tells us something fundamental: anger has become a growth hack
Malaysia’s Marketing Industry Knows This All Too Well
Scroll through Threads Malaysia on any riotous day and you’ll see the playbook.
Brands teasing each other. Snipey comments about “lazy ads.” Creators “exposing” brands for shady packaging or tone-deaf campaigns. Political snark masquerading as consumer advocacy.
None of this is accidental. Outrage — even light, comedic outrage — spreads.
But here’s the catch: Malaysian audiences are now savvy enough to know when they’re being manipulated.
As quickly as “rage bait” grows clicks, it can also trigger brand fatigue, trust erosion, and the most feared metric in 2025: negative sentiment velocity — how quickly a backlash picks up steam.
And once the spiral begins, no amount of “we apologise for any misunderstanding” statements can put the genie back in the bottle.
Rage Bait Isn’t Just About Anger — It’s About Emotion
Marketing has always been in the business of emotion. What’s changed is the emotional hierarchy of the internet.
In the attention economy, not all emotions travel equally:
So algorithms — optimised for engagement, not wellbeing — reward the strongest provocation.
The rise of the word itself shows the emotional distortion field we’re all operating in.
Oxford’s data scientists tracked usage across a “30-billion-word corpus.”
The fact that “rage bait” outpaced “aura farming” and “biohack” — two of Gen Z’s favourite self-improvement vocab terms — says something worrying: people weren’t talking about becoming better; they were talking about becoming angrier.
For marketers, that’s a cultural fault line.
Brands talk about building emotional connections — but the digital behaviour of consumers reveals emotional exhaustion.
What Should Malaysian Marketers Read Into This?
Three things.
1. Outrage may get reach, but trust gets retention.
Short-term spikes from controversy are tempting. But Malaysian consumers have long memories. They reward consistency, warmth and effort — not provocation for provocation’s sake.
2. The next phase of marketing is “emotion stewardship.”
If tech platforms are shaping how people feel, then brands — the only entities with daily, human-scale influence — have a responsibility to recalibrate the emotional climate.
Brands that help people feel better (not angrier) will enjoy longer-term engagement.
Think about Etiqa’s recent “Born here with you” campaign, or even the wholesome banter that works on Threads. These succeed because they restore something — not agitate it.
3. Emotion is now a competitive advantage.
Not data. Not AI. Not personalisation.
Emotion.
And the brands that understand the emotional condition of Malaysians — our humour, our tensions, our sensitivities, our love for nuance — will outperform those still chasing clicks with shallow tactics.
The 2025 Word of the Year proves it: consumers are overwhelmed. Outrage is everywhere. People are craving relief. This creates a gap that only brave, emotionally intelligent marketers can fill.
Rage Bait Is a Mirror — Marketers Must Decide What to Do With the Reflection
Oxford choosing “rage bait” is not an endorsement; it’s a diagnosis.
It tells us the world’s digital bloodstream is running hot.
It tells us people feel manipulated by their feeds.
It tells us the internet, for all its promise, has become emotionally overclocked.
But it also tells us something hopeful: the public noticed.
They voted for this word because they recognised it — and perhaps because they’re tired of it.
For the industry, that creates an opening.
In 2026, the marketers who win won’t be the ones who jump on the latest provocation.
They will be the ones who understand this moment clearly and respond with something better — work that resonates without exploiting, moves without baiting, and builds without inflaming.
Because if 2025 was the year rage bait became a dictionary entry, then 2026 should be the year marketing chooses another path.
A path where emotion is still the engine — but humanity is the steering wheel.
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