On Nov. 3 I attended a Lawrenceburg (Anderson County) City Council meeting which opened with an alleged jurisdictional issue between the county and city fire departments. The public sat silently and watched — for almost 40 minutes — as the county fire chief and his deputy held the floor, repeat edly berating the city fire chief. The man sitting next to me filmed a very brief portion (now deleted) of this diatribe, which the county fire chief then shared on his Facebook page, sparking public outrage all over social media. Did the 40 minute public shaming of the city fire chief solve the problem? No.  Did social media outrage from this incident solve the problem? No.  But problem-solving is no longer the point. The point is the overwrought performance which supplies the viral video clip. The point is the rage bait. Rage bait — manipulative tactics used to drive engagement online — is the Oxford University Press word of the year for 2025. If you spend any time at all online, particularly on social media, you do not need an Oxford dictionary to confirm how constant and pernicious the rage and rage baiting are. We are entering primary election season here in Kentucky, and we have already been talking with our friends and neighbors about the hateful, hard to stomach ads to replace Mitch McConnell in the U.S. Senate.  In one of his ads, Senate candidate Rep. Andy Barr says, “The woke left wants to neuter America, literally.” What in the world does that mean? He then shows a clip of black people standing in a circle, burning a flag, and then photos of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Chuck Schumer, fists raised, looking angry, with Barr’s voiceover, “They hate our values, they hate our history, and goodness knows they hate President Trump.”  So much hate, and that’s just the first 20 seconds.  A political action committee (PAC) backing Barr has released an ad which calls Nate Morris, one of Barr’s opponents in the Senate race, “Fake Nate Morris: fully woke and full of sh—.” Do these ads inform the public about policies that will create jobs, lower grocery prices, build affordable housing or ensure that American families are not bankrupted by medical debt?  No, because talking about these issues does not spark enough interest or outrage for politicians to get our attention in a fractured media landscape of 30-second soundbites.  On her Dec. 4 podcast, Jessica Tarlov, one of the cohosts of Fox News’ The Five, discusses (at the 48 minute mark) how politicians cannot break through in today’s media landscape without fomenting rage online which, in turn, goes viral and keeps their names in our distracted, short-attention-span minds until election day.  Rage baiting, Tarlov says, is “an apt word of the year.”  Social media algorithms are the third rail running through and ruining our political discourse and relationships, and yet we have grown so accustomed to online rage that we are often numb to it. “Folks with the big platforms are the ones that are driving American society,” Tarlov says, “They’re getting hired into the biggest jobs you can have, from the secretary of war to the heads of these media companies. Everyone needs content creators and influencers, whatever you want to call them, on the landing page of their organization … and it’s a vicious cycle that keeps feeding it.” The morning after the Nov. 3 Lawrenceburg City Council meeting, I watched the video go viral and the outraged commentary that accompanied it. At first, when I spotted a Facebook post that I knew was not wholly accurate, I commented with missing context, writing that I’d been there and witnessed the entire meeting.  Nobody cared. Within minutes I deleted my comments, as adding facts only sparked more rage. Rage baiting is Oxford dictionary’s word of the year for a reason.  Online rage, cruelty, bullying, trolling and the ability to post misleading information or even outright lies are destroying our relationships and communities. Meanwhile, tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg — who built these social media companies, created the algorithms that fuel our rage and help fund the PACs responsible for some of the most heinous political ads — are smiling all the way to their big, fat banks. The question is:  What are we — and the leaders we send to Congress — doing to stop it? The post It’s all the rage. How do we stop it? appeared first on The Lexington Times. ...read more read less