George Bernard Shaw noted that “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.” However, it seems that this divide has finally been overcome by the common dialect of anger. The new word of the year was announced this week by Oxford University Press, and it’s tragically appropriate: “anger bait.”
The new word was first used in 2002 and is defined as “online content that is intentionally designed to arouse anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.”
The choice is certainly in line with what I described in my recent book:The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Anger.Anger is a strange emotion. It is the ultimate liberation. It allows you to do and say things that you otherwise wouldn’t do or say. Therefore, it is addictive and contagious.
However, anger can also be a license not only to rage, but also to regulate.
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The key to anger is that it is completely subjective and relative. If you agree with a speaker, that is fair. If you don’t agree with it, it’s dangerous.
That relativism was clearly reflected in Oxford’s press release about the choice of words. Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, associated the term with “manipulation tactics that we can be drawn into online.” He denounced “internet culture” for “hijacking and influencing our emotions.”
Grathwohl warned that it is an extension of what is called “rage farming”… to manipulate responses and build anger and engagement over time by seeding content with anger bait, especially in the form of deliberate misinformation or conspiracy theory-based material.
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If you listen closely, you can almost hear the “here, here” growl of the British censors. Britain and other European countries have eradicated freedom of expression through criminalization and regulation for decades. The Internet is a particular obsession for the anti-free speech movement. The Internet, the greatest invention since the printing press, poses a threat to countries and groups seeking to control speech.
The new plague is hidden ‘algorithms’ that elevate certain messages. While liberals like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have done just that called on social media companies to use algorithms To encourage people to choose better books, the left accuses these companies of sowing division by creating forums for views it considers “misinformation, disinformation and bad information.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., questions former executives of failed banks during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on May 16, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The difficulty is distinguishing between content-based biases in algorithms (which is rightly condemned) and systems that simply elevate more popular posts. If social media only favors more popular statements, the problem with critics is not with the bait, but with their own inability to attract morsels from those surfing the Internet.
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The fact is that these companies profit from traffic and prefer messages that customers are most interested in. That drives activists to distraction because they believe their positions are healthier and superior for citizens to discuss.
The Internet, the greatest invention since the printing press, poses a threat to countries and groups seeking to control speech.
These are really calls for “enlightened algorithms” that promote truth as defined by governments and supporting experts. That is not a “hijacking” but liberating; not ‘rage bait’ but a reasoned debate. It’s that simple.
Any image or display you don’t like can be considered rage bait. The same week that Oxford took the anger bait, there was another story about how freedom of speech in the UK is in freefall.
Jon Richelieu-Booth told the Yorkshire Post that he was arrested for posting a photo on the networking site LinkedIn of himself holding a shotgun at a friend’s farm in Florida. West Yorkshire Police are said to have 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’s an all too familiar story for those of us who have documented the decline of free speech in Britain. British police have arrested people for… pray quietly in public and a man was convicted of “toxic ideologies,” — literal thoughtcrimes.
The Times of London reported that the police make approximately 12,000 arrests every year due to messages on the internet.
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Anger rhetoric has been around since humans first learned to speak. The danger of anger rhetoric is rarely the rhetoric itself. It is the use of anger rhetoric by the government and others to silence citizens.
It’s easy to say that certain messages are a trigger for anger. It’s harder to agree on what anger is. While the left will decry statements from Donald Trump as anger bait, they rarely object to such rhetoric from Hillary Clinton or Jasmine Crockett.
The same often applies to the right. Each side views its own messages as reasoned debate and the other side’s as anger bait.
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No one gets “hijacked” on the Internet. They choose their sources, and many create silos or echo chambers. It is a common feature of this ‘age of anger’.
Oxford is clearly right in choosing a word to represent age. However, it also involves using anger to rationalize censorship by treating viewpoints as harmful baits for the unsuspecting, unwashed masses. That desire to regulate speech is also often driven by anger, but is embraced as reason.
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