‘The strategy is to humiliate’: influencers and the ethics of ‘rage-bait machine’ street interviews

Influencers from anti-abortion campaigners to anti-immigration activists are making online content out of interactions with Australians on the street. Experts say the ethics are murky

“She just kind of appeared in front of me … then she asked if I thought the unborn were human,” Emma Carson says.

Carson was walking through Rundle Mall in Adelaide and thought the woman who approached her was a journalism student or a researcher.

She didn’t realise she was talking to Elspeth Mackellar, one of six content creators at Bird Flip, an organisation pledged to “end abortion”.

They conduct “street interviews”, a popular format on social media that can involve genuine interaction. However, experts say some influencers are using them as “rage bait”, ridiculing or enraging people to get more clicks, and that they operate in a grey legal area if explicit consent to record and publish has not been obtained.

In the clip of Carson, MacKellar holds a small microphone while the cameraperson is off to the side.

Carson says she was taken aback by the approach and Mackellar’s “Gish gallop”, a tactic where interviewees are bombarded with a stream of questions that may lack logic and include misinformation.

“It was only once she asked if the unborn were human that I noticed the person with a camera. I knew if I kept talking, she would continue to find ways to twist my words,” she says.

Carson ended the interview but was worried about how the clip would appear on social media and was angry about the tactic.

“The thing that irks me about people who do this rage-baiting stuff, accost people, blindside them, they don’t want a proper debate because it would wipe out the points they want to make,” she says.

Rage baiting is online content “deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular webpage or social media content”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s publisher .

There are plenty of other tactics being used by Australian influencers. Some approach demonstrators at pro-Palestine protests, anti-One Nation and anti-March for Australia protests. They then often publish short clips of the protesters looking angry and dishevelled.

Others have set up tables or signs to stage “prove me wrong” scenarios, a tactic popularised by the late US far-right activist Charlie Kirk . Often, the well-rehearsed influencers will post content showing them “demolishing” their detractors.

Other examples include evangelical Christians choosing to preach or to try to debate religion with Muslims, including during Ramadan.