Solutions for Rage Baiting

“I don’t want people to get too cynical,” Tobias Rose-Stockwell said. “It’s easy to see the faults in our enemies and not in ourselves. We’re all part of this dance, and my goal with the book is to help us reflect collectively about how we are all doing a weird thing right now.”

Collective reflection is important, but it’s also not your sole responsibility to fix the problem. Social media companies have a lot of power to step in, and there are well established solutions. “Slowing things down on the platform level could go a huge distance in terms of helping cool us down,” Rose-Stockwell said.

In practice, that can look like adding a prompt that essentially asks “you sure about that?” when the system detects you’re about to post something derogatory. Systems like Twitter’s Community Notes, which lets users add context or corrections to inflammatory tweets, can stop rage before it starts. Social media companies could also throw a wrench in the algorithm, which slows the promotion of a piece of content that’s about to go viral to ensure that it’s actually a healthy thing for the company to promote.

However, social media companies are companies, of course, and the incentives aren’t always there to push them to do the right thing. Rage baiting keeps eyes on your app, after all. The government has some tools at its disposal as well.

“On the government side of things, I do think that Section 230 is too broad,” Rose-Stockwell said, referencing the American regulation which protects tech companies from legal responsibility over the things users post. “I think there needs to be more liability put in to force companies to mitigate harms,” he said.