Hannah Gallop
Over the last two decades, dictionaries and language bodies select a ‘Word of the Year’ to reflect the mood and conversations that have shaped the past twelve months. In doing so, they offer a useful snapshot of the culture at that moment.
For 2025, the message they sent was pretty uncomfortable, with Oxford’s Word of the Year being ‘rage bait’ while Merriam-Webster’s is ‘slop’.
At first glance, it would be easy to dismiss them as niche internet slang or passing online jokes. But their rise into everyday language points to something much bigger.
Both terms speak to a digital environment that rewards provocation and volume over judgement and value. They are less about individual pieces of bad content and more a useful shorthand for the systems and incentives shaping how information is produced, amplified and consumed today.
At a surface level, rage bait and slop describe two very different types of content but in practice, they are closely linked.
Rage bait refers to content deliberately designed to provoke anger or outrage in order to drive engagement. It is often provocative, divisive, or misleading by design, engineered to trigger emotional responses that algorithms reward with increased reach and visibility. While outrage-driven content has long existed online, its elevation to Oxford’s Word of the Year reflects how normalised and effective this tactic has become.
Meanwhile, slop, as defined by Merriam-Webster, describes digital content of low quality, produced at scale, often using AI, with little consideration for originality, accuracy, or intent. It’s not necessarily offensive or inflammatory, but it is abundant and increasingly indistinguishable from more considered content.
Seen side by side, rage bait and slop say less about individual posts and more about the conditions that produce them. They highlight an attention economy that favours reaction and output over care and consideration.
Rage bait and slop both point to the same core problem – a digital environment that rewards quick reactions rather than considered thinking.
The rise of rage bait into everyday language signals a growing awareness of how emotion can be engineered online. Social platforms in particular are designed to amplify content that triggers strong emotions, and research from MIT shows that emotionally charged or misleading posts spread far more quickly than factual, balanced reporting. In practice, this means that provocation often travels further than truth.
At the same time, volume (or, often ‘slop’) is routinely favoured over value. Platform incentives reward constant output, speed and visibility, while judgement and longevity are sidelined. As AI accelerates production, much of what is published attracts little meaningful engagement, yet still adds to an increasingly saturated and lower-quality information environment.
While AI-driven slop and outrage content can still mislead, people are increasingly able to identify when outrage is being manufactured and research shows rising scepticism towards the brands, platforms and voices that depend on these tactics for attention.
From a PR and communications perspective, the emergence of rage bait and slop as mainstream descriptors is a commentary on content quality and also points to a widening gap between being seen and being trusted.
Rage driven content may deliver a short term burst of visibility but it rarely builds genuine belief. Over time, this can become a reputational risk as audiences are being taught to take what a business says less seriously when they consistently choose provocation over substance.
This matters most in reputation-led sectors, where decisions are built on confidence and assurance, rather than fleeting bursts of attention. In those contexts, trust remains the currency that matters most. And unlike engagement metrics, once it is diluted, it is extremely difficult to win back.
If rage bait and slop came to define 2025, they should also be taken as a warning. They point to an ecosystem that has repeatedly rewarded speed over substance and reaction over judgement.
But there is a lesson in the ‘slop’. Audiences become harder to win over, scepticism is growing, and trust is re-emerging as the factor that actually differentiates.
In 2026, the opportunity for businesses is to step away from slop and ragebait, and rebuild communications that earn attention rather than chase it, by investing in communications that are deliberate, credible, and built to last.