Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content (abc.net.au)

74 points by robtherobber an hour ago

florkbork 44 minutes ago

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

fosron 38 minutes ago

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.

bilekas 42 minutes ago

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.

bwb 36 minutes ago

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

code_duck 17 minutes ago

Horrible sympathy and religion bait like "I bet nobody will upvote this poor sick child with one leg, won't you? 1 amen = 1 prayer!"

ThunderSizzle 14 minutes ago

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.

matherial 9 minutes ago

What are you trying to say? That Facebook should be excused because others also behave badly?

Otherwise, we can dislike both things and it adds nothing to say "but why aren't your talking about the other thing instead". And for what it's worth, there is a pretty clear difference between the journalistic standards of FB bait and of the legacy media.

LunaSea 5 minutes ago

Social media has been protected by the Safe Harbour rules because they had millions of users creating content which was difficult to monitor and moderate.

If they start producing their own content they might get considered like a news organisation with a whole different set of rules being applied to them and Safe Harbour being inapplicable.

phendrenad2 3 minutes ago

[delayed]

cedws 40 minutes ago

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.

shevy-java 32 minutes ago

Indeed. What I noticed is that the quality of the videos went down on youtube in the last 3 years. Now, the quality was never as great as it used to be anyway, but Google changed various things that made youtube worse. They are slowly killing off youtube without realising it.

Levitating 6 minutes ago

A lot of channels got bought by private equity. YouTube is saturated with similar content so creators have to resort to clickbait to keep up. AI has allowed creators to increase their efficiency writing scripts.

I don't know what you believe Google changed about YouTube, but I believe it has just made itself worse.

graemep an hour ago

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...

miladyincontrol 42 minutes ago

FB and IG reels both. Twitter gets a lot of rightfully owed criticism about it's fair share but its always weird to me seeing people slam twitter then go right on to IG or some other meta owned app as if its significantly different.

BoxOfRain 3 minutes ago

I'm so glad I got myself off Instagram and Reddit, the longer I go without them the more I realise what massive cognitohazards both of them are if you spend too much time on them. Different mechanisms but both were much more of a net drain on me than I realised before leaving them.

lukan 15 minutes ago

Is it ethical wrong in this case, to wish those persons to get beaten up one day, by one of the people where they fueled their hate (who do take it out on other people for real)? So they reap what they sow?

graemep 9 minutes ago

Understandable but wrong.

Growtika an hour ago

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

seydor an hour ago

Can't they just do it with AI ?

fergie 42 minutes ago

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

juleiie 9 minutes ago

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.

Levitating 3 minutes ago

Meta could help the situation, for instance by providing fact-checking tools and banning rage-bait creators.

Instead they have removed those tools and are paying these creators. So it's not just consumers to blame here.

shevy-java 33 minutes ago

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?).

efilife 44 minutes ago

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

chinathrow 41 minutes ago

Not Clickbait.

If you provide both:

a) a service to earn money from content

b) an algo promoting those videos

then yes, IMHO they pay them directly for the content produced.

pizza234 a minute ago

There is a distinction between:

- Meta is commissioning or sponsoring rage-bait

- Controversial creators are earning money through Facebook's content monetization program

The title is ambiguous (at first, I thought it was the first case), and that's where the clickbait lies.

No doubt that also the second case is a serious problem, but that's orthogonal to the ambiguity of the title.

myaccountonhn 40 minutes ago

So they do directly pay them?