And now, the first official “lesson” from the RFA…
Rage bait is anything posted to social media with the intention at attract engagement by making the audience upset. I post a lot of this lately on my main Tumblr because lots of things make me mad. And mad is such a fun emotion sometimes. However, there are red flags to look out for when it comes to rage bait.
Most people post rage bait to expose an injustice, or to simply vent. That’s fine. But it can be used to mislead, misinform, or even to sell something. Here’s an example I would like to discuss. (Summary below. You don’t have to watch the whole thing. This isn’t a real academy.)
This is Anne Sisteron on Instagram, with a video titled Cultural Appropriation at Louis Vuitton. It’s provocative. In fact, so far it has provoked over four million views.
It is massively more popular than her other videos, including one about helping dogs! The rage bait was successful, but where are the red flags?
Here’s the thing. The red flags in this video are hard to spot unless you know what you’re looking for. But if you learn only one thing from this let it be this; be skeptical of everything the internet people tell you.
Nothing she said was a flat out lie. But facts were misrepresented. She posted this video in 2025, but LV released the bag in question back in 2007. And the cheap bag that inspired the LV originated in Hong Kong in the 1960s, over twenty years before its association with Ghana. LV never called their product the Ghana Go-To bag. The original bag did get the nickname of the Ghana Must Go bag when over s million Ghanaian immigrants were expelled from Nigeria in 1983.
Back to Anne, she used her reinterpretation of the facts to deliver a call to action: “… vote with your dollars.” This suggests a boycott of LV’s goods.
However, depending on how you see the video, you might notice a button saying “view shop”.
And if you tap that button, you will be shown a shop to view.
And in that shop you can buy the jewelry she’s wearing in the video, along with other luxury pieces from her own shop. And at 4 million views, it’s safe to assume she made a sale or two, ironically by exploiting the very same situation she accused LV of exploiting.
So, if you already had solid knowledge of LV’s plaid laundry tote, the deportation of West Africans from Nigeria, and the origin of Hong Kong’s red-white-blue bag, you saw the red flags in Anne’s story immediately. And you should also try out for Jeopardy. The rest of us just need to be more skeptical, taking few things at face value.