Paris Demetriades
As 2025 draws to a close, roughly ten technological behemoths, most based in the United States and some in the Far East, are not only widening the gap between the tiny share of the ultrarich and everyone else on the planet. They are also contributing, perhaps even unintentionally, which only heightens the dystopian quality of it all, to the growth of a chilling phenomenon that should probably shake us more than the chaotic inequalities themselves. They are shaping how we move, how we behave, and how we think, turning our supposedly authentic and unaffected opinions, which we like to imagine are free from self-serving motives, into a product.
Beyond the staggering profits they pull in from business activities that now span the globe, these few 21st-century empires that own the world’s largest online platforms have reached the point where their questionable methods and their ruthless algorithmic logic, which grinds everything down and often rots everything it touches, are alienating and cheapening even our alleged principles and values. This is a form of manipulation so effectively camouflaged that most of the time we do not even notice it happening, especially if we belong to the groups most vulnerable and least defended against such pressures. A perfectly fitting symbol of this dystopia is the term that Oxford University Press in the United Kingdom selected as the “word of the year” just a few days ago. The publishers chose “rage bait,” a term defined as online content deliberately shared to provoke anger and indignation through an offensive or provocative tone. The purpose, as anyone can guess, is to increase engagement, views, and therefore the commercial value of whatever content is being pushed once it becomes a marketable commodity. It is something like the clickbait used by tabloids and plenty of other news sites in previous years, only worse, because the goal of rage bait is not simply to lure you into visiting a website. It is to lure you into getting angry without even leaving your social media feed, which is usually where it unfolds.
It is obvious that Cyprus’s new political “phenomenon,” 25-year-old Fidias Panayiotou, is essentially a case study in rage bait. He has admitted as much himself. Regardless of what he claims to believe or whatever ideology he insists he follows, which is clearly none, he enjoys posting provocative content designed to inflame one group or another, or really anyone who might for any reason feel attacked, all so he can gain attention, views, and why not, money. What matters to Panayiotou, as a near-perfect poster child for rage bait, is not whether he believes in something before he turns it into an issue. What matters is whether what he says or does will be considered controversial. With the same ease that he interviewed Ersin Tatar at the presidential palace in the occupied north and chatted with a celebrity Turkish-Cypriot YouTuber in the name of supposed rapprochement, he would just as easily give a platform, in my view, to criminal far-right elements who might throw out lines like “the only good Turk is a dead one” and similar nonsense. With the same ease that he would amplify Russian disinformation, he would amplify Israeli disinformation or any other variety of low-grade conspiracy theory. Ethics, even when he tries to present them as motivation, simply do not seem to factor into the “opinions” of someone like Panayiotou. He wants to trigger anger and reactions. That is what concerns him and that is what interests him.
But it is not only rage bait. To a large extent, our entire lives have turned into a kind of internet performance. The conversation developing around these issues is both necessary and valuable. With intensity and persistence, that conversation needs to continue.
