Beyond Safer Internet Day: Protecting Brand Equity in the Ragebait Era
By Sam Griffith, Head of Digital, December19
As we observe Safer Internet Day 2026, Oxford University Press’s choice of ‘ragebait’ as their 2025 Word of the Year takes on deeper significance.
They captured what brands are increasingly confronting: a digital ecosystem designed to provoke anger, with companies paying to advertise within that outrage. While internet safety is rightly, primarily about protecting users from harm, adland has a responsibility to protect brands from complicity in systems that prioritise engagement over wellbeing.
The Ragebait Reality: When Context Becomes Contamination
Ragebait isn’t just divisive content, but the algorithmic architecture itself. Increasingly, we’re seeing video content with deliberately misleading headlines, featuring staged confrontations, alongside tailored comment sections presenting false dichotomies, often exploiting cultural flashpoints. Platforms have learned that anger drives interaction, and interaction drives revenue. The result is a media environment where emotionally charged content systematically outperforms balanced perspectives.
When your brand appears adjacent to this content, you inherit emotion. Users scrolling through content designed to enrage don’t compartmentalise when they encounter your ad. This is the halo effect in reverse. While positive brand associations can lift surrounding content, negative emotional states contaminate brand perception. In fact, research from the Advertising Research Foundation shows that ads appearing next to negative news content see up to 2.8 times lower brand favourability scores than identical ads in neutral contexts. The emotional residue transfers directly to brand sentiment.
Digital Defiance and the Safer Internet Movement
Safer Internet Day should signal a cultural shift. As Jess Butcher MBE, CEO of Scrollaware has highlighted, we’re witnessing digital defiance, particularly among Gen Z and Gen Alpha. These cohorts are increasingly sceptical of platforms designed to manipulate their attention and emotions. We’re even observing the take-up of "dumb phones" among teens seeking to escape algorithmic feeds. And this isn't niche behaviour. A 2025 Pew Research study found that 68% of 18-29 year-olds have deliberately limited their social media use due to concerns about mental health impact, up from 42% in 2022.
Brands like KitKat and Heineken are already leveraging this shift. KitKat's "Have a Break from Your Feed" campaign saw the creation of a toolkit of resources for parents and schools, to help families establish healthier digital boundaries. Similarly, Heineken's "Boring Mode" featured an app that intentionally makes your phone ‘boring’ during social occasions - dimming the screen, removing notifications, and making social media apps temporarily inaccessible.
The question for marketers is, do you want to be known as the brand that funds the rage machine, or the brand that respects your audience’s digital wellbeing?
What This Means for Media Planning in 2026
Introducing ‘Emotional Safety’
Rage-driven environments can often deliver what looks like efficient performance: high viewability, and spikes in engagement. However, this efficiency is largely illusory as recall, consideration and long-term equity all suffer in the background. Instead start tracking cost-per-quality-impression, where quality includes “emotional safety” parameters. For December19, “emotional safety” involves protecting brands from association with content deliberately designed to provoke anger, fear, or outrage in users, even when that content isn’t technically violative or platform policies.
Align with Digital Wellbeing
Position your brand alongside the emerging consumer movement rejecting manipulative digital design. Choosing to move budget to first available impression takeovers and considerate time-of-day targeting will help brands strategically position themselves for where consumer values are heading.
The Bigger Question
Oxford’s recognition of ‘ragebait’ as the defining term of 2025 is a warning signal.
The uncomfortable question isn’t whether ragebait is increasing. The question is whether your media strategy is complicit in it, and what that compliance is costing you in brand value you can’t easily measure.
This Safer Internet Day, take control of your emotional context. Because in the era of ragebait, brand safety requires active choices about where, when, and how you show up.