Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content

> "it is not Meta's role to police offensiveness"

Just to fund, transmit, amplify, protect, and profit from it.

I will call out the ABC here for taking a lot of the boots on the ground work that Tom Tanuki - independent journo (https://youtube.com/@tomtanuki) has done with these far right slopaganda mills, slicing off the prior recognition and pretending it's a big new problem they just found. While a bit of this is new... Is it that new? Is this report that detailed? Hmmmmm

Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me. They are bad for your soul, bad for the nation, bad for the world.

Facebook is still big in my country, Lithuania, and both rage-bait and other type of fringe content is rampant, and even worse after fact-checking was removed. It is wild, and with some outside actors (specific country that shall not be named) it is a big problem with political and social effects being felt IRL.

I think this is a bit misleading.

It sounds to me like the creators are creating and uploading the content, and then that is getting monetised on the platform?

The title makes it sound like meta is commissioning the content? I don't think that is the case here? Or is it?

Directly commissioning someone to create it is pretty wild.

This isn't anything new, it was abundantly clear after Facebook removed their fact checking team during covid that the priority was engagement over everything else, and rage bait is exactly that.

Every single time historically we have unregulated media you get a shitshow. I think you can blame our societies nonchalant lassez faire attitude to the propaganda profiteering by American big tech for lots of the issues we face today. Honestly: do cocaine laced recommender algorithms really benefit us? I really hope the EU fully bans this stuff.

FB is built on rage bait, what else do they have beside cute videos?

Newspapers and also pay people to produce rage-bait content.

If we were normal society company like Meta would be shut down and its CEO would be in Hague and prosecuted for crimes against humanity

The companies clearly won’t listen to reason, not as long as this strategy works.

Voting seems to work, either with actual votes, or wallet, or attention.

Ragebait is what FB runs on. A lot of these people do not even believe what they say. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...

Social media platforms have been paying out for attention seeking behaviour for a long time now. It’s why every YouTube video now has the same lame shocked face, red arrows, and clickbait title. It’s why assholes film themselves intentionally pissing people off for TikTok. It’s a whole category called nuisance tubing.

I remember during COVID I saw a number of YouTubers swing from producing normal content into conspiracy shit. Their views ballooned. I saw a nasty feedback loop where the more controversial content received more engagement, hence more ad revenue, leading to more of it being produced.

These platforms are actively degenerating society; there’s a reason the CCP is keeping tight control and reportedly rebalancing things to promote educational creators on China’s.

I have a very mixed friend group from hard left and hard right and they all get their own little bubble of rage bait that amplifies their own beliefs. Since i have them in my feed I get this crap from both side in my feed thanks to the algorithms. So i barely touch the site anymore

I don't know anyone who uses Facebook anymore

How is this any different than traditional media? Cable news creates fake problems and controversy constantly, and pay their news anchors well to do so.

In return, many companies that rely on these problems, turn around and advertise on these networks.

Social media is just following the same strategy.

It is not only rage bait. They like the new corporate fascism and that its followers believe that the right wing will fix the economy.

Maybe they have some romantic ideals about the 1930s, where Schacht fixed the economy for Hitler with a form of quantitative easing. But that scheme became unsustainable around 1938.

The difference is that back then the powerful needed people. The current Silicon Valley "elites" want to get rid of everyone, make them dumb and replace them with AI.

The sooner the right wing audience realizes this, the better.

This is a really funny way to describe Facebook's (and Youtube's, and TikTok's, and...) entire business model. It's long been known that they aggressively promote ahem "engaging" content. How do they incentivize people to make it? Ad revenue!

Especially before elections, it feels like they rewards people for being toxic

Can't they just do it with AI ?

Ironically, this article is rage-bait.

Maybe they should pay their programmers to fix the audio bug in their iOS app. I can't listen to my podcasts and use the facebook app at the same time because it wants to mute the podcast to play nothing, even with the phone on silent and autoplay disabled the facebook app just randomly mutes my podcasts for no reason making me not want to use the app.

Clickbait. Title makes it sound like they pay them directly to promote the platform, but they get paid through facebook content monetisation program

People want to feel like they're doing something in the "culture war". Rage-bait gives them an outlet. Facebook might be saving us from total civil war here.

they are paying Nazis to make Nazi content.

First of all, Facebook is not even the worst offender. That'd have to go to X and TikTok. Rage bait, propaganda, and straight up bad actors with money pushing their agenda. If you got angry because of a TikTok video, you are being exploited.

Some of these actors also put a lot of money into campuses in the west, so when you're done watching some terrible propaganda, you can join a local club and find your way to more people getting angry at misinformation. This is how we get stuff like "globalize intifada" and students "occupying" buildings.

I wish this was just hyperbole, but really, go check for yourself what kind of money state actors put into schools and universities in the west, and why.

When will people learn that rage bait content thrives thanks to people who are so delicate and emotional that they get unhealthily enraged at such content?

Stop raging on the internet and the rage bait content will disappear overnight.

Stop buying oil, chasing newest phones, luxuries, and the climate will get better overnight.

It’s all on the consumers, contrary to Redditor belief that the big corporations are at fault, it’s simply the matter of demand and thus supply. Not the other way around.

Take accountability. I know nowadays it is very unpopular to take accountability but this is the first step to make world better place. You can only change your own habits.

Now people understand why Suckerberg is called Suckerberg.

Those greedy billionaires also keep on having ties to right wing nuts. Let's not forget Melon Usk with his suspicious right-arm-raising gestures (having done so twice, which is quite strange when you do the same gesture twice in a row - I mean there can be no doubt about this if you do it twice; twice is an accident?).

Why do the richest and most powerful humans, who have seen all of the world and its wonders, and can go anywhere anytime, and get all the luxuries our civilization has to offer, and never have to struggle for anything in their lives..

want to make it worse?

The irony here is that ABC is the platfrom doing the rage-baiting.