‘The strategy is just to humiliate’: concerns growing about ‘rage-bait machine’ street interview tactics

“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.

“The strategy is to just humiliate people who disagree with them.”

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.

The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman-Grant, said last year there were “growing concerns” about street interviews that “appeared to exploit or humiliate” people, including homeless, drunk or drug-affected people, the West Australian reported.

“Just because something may be technically legal does not mean it is ethical,” she said.

Dr Lisa Harrison, a media and communications lecturer at Flinders Unversity, said the ethics behind street interviews were “really disappointing”. “They’re jumping on controversial topics. You have to wonder if it’s about the controversy or the content,” she said, adding there were also multiple ways to make money out of such content.

She lists advertising, endorsements, paid appearances, sales and fundraising as some of the potential commercial benefits.

“And there’s a lot of ego involved in this,” she says.

In a typical interaction, MacKellar asks people if they believe in human rights then claims it is “hypocritical” to believe in both human rights and abortion.

In fact, international human rights laws protect the right to safe abortions, and do not apply to the unborn.

Prudence Flowers, Flinders University senior lecturer in US history, says in the US, rage-baiting street interviews about abortion have been popular for a while, and her work has shown an increasing crossover between anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigration groups.

She says it is starting to become normalised that someone “might bound up to you and ask questions” before publishing the responses. But she warns that people have no control once the footage is posted and that engaging with street interviews is “just making money for someone else”.

“Everything is content,” she says.

‘Rage baiting’ potential risks

Rage-baiting street interviews can, according to one expert, potentially push beyond questions of ethics and ego and into a more murky legal terrain.

David Vaile, a University of New South Wales privacy and data protection researcher and the former chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation, says the “rage-bait machine” risks breaching a range of state and federal laws including the surveillance devices act, privacy laws, defamation laws, and potentially stalking and harassment laws.

“To the extent the recording starts or continues without the person being aware it’s going on, that may trigger the breach of the Surveillance Devices Act,” he said.

Privacy laws, he said, also meant people should get consent for recording – but complaints often ended up in a “black hole”, and along with other laws were often ambiguous, and weakly or rarely enforced.

Publishing a video of someone else in “bad faith” and painting a false picture that casts that person in a bad light could be a defamation risk, or a breach of stalking and harassment laws if someone was targeted repeatedly, he said.

“And the more you disclose it or broadcast or publish it, that may be a further separate offence from the bare recording,” he said.