Welcome to the Age of Engineered Outrage

Last November, News24 traced hundreds of fake news stories targeting South Africa back to a small marketing company in northern India. What they discovered was an unremarkable office wedged between a gym and a car dealership. From that unlikely address, a handful of people quietly built a global network of hijacked websites, replacing real organisations’ domains with AI-generated news posing as journalism. Their motive was commercial, not ideological. But the consequences travelled far beyond their street in Dehradun. Some of these fabricated stories reached mainstream audiences, prompting formal government clarifications in multiple countries.

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It’s a fitting example for the information environment we now communicate in where a low-cost, low-effort operation can produce disproportionate impact and falsehoods travel faster than corrections. This is a digital ecosystem that rewards attention over truth, prompting us to ask: if this is all it takes to distort public perception, what does it mean for those of us whose work depends on credibility?

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For a long time we described the internet as 'noisy'. But noise was something we could manage. What we face now is active distortion that’s structural, systemic and baked into the incentives of the platforms themselves. That reality was confirmed at the end of 2025 when Oxford University Press announced that its Word of the Year is 'rage bait'. The term has tripled in usage over the past twelve months, defined as online content deliberately engineered to provoke anger or outrage to drive engagement. According to Oxford Languages, its very existence reflects how aware people are becoming of the manipulation tactics shaping their digital experiences and how much more vulnerable audiences have become to emotional exploitation online.

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Inside this environment, even legitimate newsrooms feel the pressure to adopt sensationalist tones to compete with machine-generated provocation. And the rise of generative AI has compounded the issue. NewsGuard’s latest audit shows that major AI tools now repeat false information more than a third of the time, almost double the rate of last year. The result is a toxic feedback loop where the content we consume is increasingly polluted by fabricated articles, synthetic personas and coordinated behaviour designed to manipulate engagement.

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Naturally, trust is becoming more and more fragile in response. The latest Ipsos Reputation Council sitting shows how hesitant leaders have become about speaking publicly on complex issues. Only 21% are prepared to do so. Yet more than half still believe ESG is fundamentally reshaping business operations, even as caution grows around how loudly or publicly those commitments are expressed. It’s a paradox that reflects the fact that organisations know they need to act, but fear how their actions will be interpreted in an ecosystem prone to misreading everything.

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On top of all of this we have the broader democratic picture. The 2025 Global State of Democracy report shows measurable declines in press freedom, freedom of expression and access to justice. More than half the countries assessed saw deterioration in at least one democratic indicator in the last five years. Within this deteriorating trust environment, communicators are expected to still operate as though the rules haven’t changed.

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But they have changed. And the implications for reputation are significant.
The work of communication has shifted from message management to meaning management. Reputations no longer move at the speed of media cycles, but the speed of algorithms that are prone to scraping, remixing and refracting messages back without care for context.

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Which means communicators need to rethink their role. Credibility has to be actively built, defended and continually reinforced. That requires us to pay close attention to everything being said about an organisation, especially when false narratives arise. To counter this, we need a more human approach to storytelling, because audiences may be fragmented, but they still respond to clarity, empathy and authenticity. And it calls for a louder push for platform accountability, because the opacity of algorithmic decision-making now holds serious reputational implications.

The News24 investigation is a reminder that the information environment has outpaced the systems designed to safeguard it. Reputations now live in a digital environment where truth is optional and outrage is engineered.

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As communicators, if we don’t adapt to how this reality shapes the way people understand institutions, brands and public life, we risk it becoming even harder to navigate. The truth may not protect itself anymore. But we still can.