Rage as Revenue: How Anger Became the Currency of Digital Media

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine 'rage bait' and 'anger clicking' as core mechanisms of contemporary digital media economies, arguing that outrage has become a primary driver of visibility, engagement, and profit. Building on the concepts of the ‘manufacture of dissent’ and ‘moral outrage networks’, it shows how the classical logic of propaganda oriented toward silence, conformity, and manufactured consent has been structurally inverted. In platform-based attention economies, dissent is no longer suppressed but actively cultivated, and anger functions as a predictable, extractable resource. The principle that ‘angry people click more’ is analysed not as a psychological curiosity but as an organising rule of digital capitalism, shaping content production, algorithmic ranking, and user behaviour. Rage bait is shown to rely less on plausibility or persuasion than on provocation, exploiting the fact that outrage generates reaction even when claims are openly implausible. Anger clicking converts moral concern into measurable engagement, transforming denunciation, correction, and ridicule into unpaid digital labour. Drawing on research in political communication, social psychology, and the sociology of online harassment, the article demonstrates how anger circulates collectively through networked infrastructures that reward escalation, polarisation, and symbolic conflict. The result is a communicative environment in which truth is economically disadvantaged, outrage is structurally rewarded, and dissent becomes a permanent and profitable output of the media system. Rage bait and anger clicking thus emerge not as pathologies of online culture but as rational adaptations to the incentive structures of platform capitalism.