Videos featuring simple expressions of pain and sadness attract millions of views and dedicated admirers on social networks.
Whether it’s a government-funded misinformation campaign, a content creator trying to win followers, or a company trying to sell a product, there’s a proven way to attract followers and make money on the Internet: get that people have some sort of feeling.
Social networking platforms have been questioned for encouraging creators to stir up anger among their audiences. But these criticisms often focus on content intended to enrage people and engage with the posts.
This practice, often called Ragebait, has been criticized and even held responsible for the political polarization that has occurred in recent years. But anger isn’t the only emotion that leads social network users to stop by the comments section or repost a video.
The Internet is also full of what some call “sadbait” – the bait of sadness. It gets much less attention, but some of the most successful content online today is melancholic and melodramatic.
The influencers film themselves crying. Scam artists lure their victims with bad luck stories.
By 2024, Tiktokers hit hundreds of millions of views with a genre of desperate videos called “Corecore.” In them, news clippings and depressive films are shown against a sad musical background.
People may think they don’t want to feel sad. But dark, melancholic, and even disturbing posts appear to present surprising results among humans and among algorithms that select the content.
Sadbait’s success can tell us a lot about the Internet and ourselves.
“Images that show strong emotions of any kind – anger, sadness, disgust or even laughter – Accompany the spectators“, says researcher and investigative journalist Soma Basu from the University of Tampere, Finland. He studies the spread of online media.
Creators know that their content is rolling across screens amidst an endless stream of videos vying for the audience’s attention. Explain that an emotional, clear and urgent appeal can turn off viewers.
But Basu points out that there is something about images, particularly mourning, that can break the line separating audience from content, creating the opportunity to form a special kind of connection.
Sadbait doesn’t always have to be sad for viewers. Another viral genre of Sadbait on Instagram and Tiktok features images of AI-generated images, showing cats with deladori expressions – to the sound of an AI-generated cover version of the melancholic song What I was made forby singer Billie Eilish, with Meow replacing the lyrics.
These unfortunate kittens were so popular that Eilish sang the musical version with Meadows in October at Madison Square Garden in New York (United States). And the audience happily sang along with her.
It also doesn’t need to show real human beings and their feelings.
In the spring of 2024 in the Northern Hemisphere, AI-generated images of hot war veterans and poor children dominated Facebook feeds. The researchers indicate that these posts were among those that received the most interactions on the platform.
And when an image generated by a fictional victim of Hurricane Helene went viral in the United States, right-wing influencers and even one Republican politician responded that it “didn’t matter” that the image was fake because people identified with it.
Regardless of whether the images are real, people love these sensations.
Algorithms and audiences
Researchers who analyze highly emotional online content, both misinformation and memes, relate their success to maximizing social networking platforms.
Your algorithms are designed to promote posts that make your users spend more time commenting, watching, and sharing. The more reactions a post generates, whatever the reason, the more likely it is to be seen by others.
The logic is simple. Internet users, like movie audiences and book readers before them, respond to sad and sentimental content — and algorithms promote this kind of material.
On major social networking platforms, content creators are paid based on the time and depth of user interaction with their posts. And the best way to reach the audience is to please the algorithms.
Therefore, creators try to find out what the machine will promote and nurture that type of content, creating an endless cycle of production and promotion.
Perhaps there is a certain cynicism in the techniques used by content creators to exploit views. But videos with Sadbait are not just intended to arouse emotions. They can offer a channel to experience these feelings and analyze them, according to Washington University researcher Nina Lutz.
“I don’t think it’s a reaction to the content itself,” Lutz explains, “but the content is for the space to empower people with common interests and experiences.”
Tiktok Account with Black and White Blue Street Lighting Series with Depression Captions reach millions of views. Your profiles often leave phrases like “Direct messages are open if you need to talk.”
Amid comments on the clearly AI-generated images of crying children and wounded war veterans, strangers share their totally human, frankly and detailed problems.
“I read comments and discussions about sexual aggression, child loss, polio, abortion, sibling and child loss, profound loneliness, and crises of faith,” Lutz says. “Sad and heavy topics. I had to step away from my computer several times.”
Using posts as a place to talk about your problems is an old practice on the Internet.
“When I was a teenager, a lot happened in fan spaces on Tumblr, which were also public forums,” Lutz says. “People are looking for connection and finding it in perhaps unorthodox places.”
And users’ conversations about their lives in the comments of Sadbait videos attract watchers, fueling the algorithm.
Crying lessons
This type of content is especially useful in a world where sadness can be taboo, explains Soma Basu.
He studied a peculiar genre of depressing videos on Indian social networks. They are the so-called “crying videos”. In them, Indian influencers lip-sync and cry on Tiktok, to the sound of audio replaced by film or music.
This type of video formed its own category of viral content, until the application was banned in the country in 2020. The success has been so great that it is possible to find educational videos teaching content creators how to produce crying videos.
After the Tiktok ban, many influencers who made careers out of viral crying videos migrated to Instagram reels.
For Basu, crying videos “go viral because they don’t fit accepted social standards.” Seeing people express emotions – which usually only occur in private – gives viewers “rare and precious access to something particular, veiled and special”.
This type of digital intimacy can seem like voyeurism from the audience and the creators’ exposureism. But sad content also serves a deeper function, exposing and commenting on aspects of society offline, according to Basu.
“In your passionate display of emotion, [estes vídeos] They complicate and expose the fissure between different kinds of divisions: class, caste or ethnicity, gender, sexuality, educational attainment, and so on,” he explains.
The depicted transgression of showing emotion at unexpected times or showing empathy by someone from another social group is part of the audience’s attraction to Choro’s videos, Basu explains.
In Tiktok videos, as in any other type of art or presentation, users and creators can act outside the lines generally allowed by social codes and expectations.
Another factor that makes sad content attract the audience is the continuous detection of its possible meaning. “New interpretations arise as it circulates through different social groups,” according to Basu. “These videos fuel various social connections.”
The crying video may begin with a teenager at his parents’ house, exploring what it would feel like to cry in public.
But it can become a video edition ridiculed by an ironic breeder, an opportunity for two elderly women in different parts of the world to connect with their children’s stories or a promising career as an influencer who drives luxury cars to that same teenager who he cried in the video.
This is what happened to Sagar Goswami, one of the Indian influencers studied by Basu.
But Nina Lutz points out that experts and observers often examine digital ecosystems as if people were unconscious participants in a giant machine created to attract attention. For her, there are important technical, economic and psychological forces navigating the waters of the Internet, but that doesn’t mean their users are distracted.
“People realize this,” Lutz explains. “Everyday users understand the economics of engagement.”
“We need to move away from this perception that digital audiences know nothing about this dynamic – they are in it!”
Humans online are not like fish in a barrel. Instead, they are enlightened consumers who use the rod, the water inside and the hooks they immersed as tools to achieve their goals, according to Lutz.
Perhaps this explains why much of the engagement with the sadbait content studied by Lutz and other researchers is “at once, ironic and sincere,” he said.
In fact, a popular method of consuming this style of content is comments on the content itself, according to Basu.
Users share Sadbait and other pieces for laughs and ridicule, or even collect them in compilations of so-called “CUNGE” content.
But for the content curator’s algorithms, like is like, ironic or not.
Lutz says many users know that algorithms and content creators are there to manipulate them and can recognize when a post is insincere. But if users get involved in a post, success is guaranteed, regardless of the reason and form of engagement.
Like everything else on the Internet, sadbait content can work for a very simple reason: people want to see it.
Read at Original version of this report (in English) on the site BBC Innovation.
Source: Terra
Ben Stock is a lifestyle journalist and author at Gossipify. He writes about topics such as health, wellness, travel, food and home decor. He provides practical advice and inspiration to improve well-being, keeps readers up to date with latest lifestyle news and trends, known for his engaging writing style, in-depth analysis and unique perspectives.
