Saturday Hashtag: #GlobalRageEconomy

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If it feels like the social media outrage economy is getting more intense, that’s because it is.

Artificial intelligence has made outrage cheaper, faster, and easier to manufacture at massive scale.

And the people producing it aren’t just politicians, governments, or influencer operations. A new class of participant has emerged: the economically marginalized, whose only goal is to profit from whatever content ignites Western audiences.

The Players

These have historically been the primary players in the outrage economy:

• Political organizations spending millions to manufacture and amplify outrage.
• Coordinated domestic influence operations exploiting existing social divisions.
• State-linked accounts from Russia, China, North Korea, and elsewhere sowing political division. 
• Real citizens arguing over legitimate political grievances.

For years, those were the main players. But AI has been changing the economics for all operators — making agenda-driven content cheaper, faster to produce, and easier to target, all while passing off manufactured support on an enormous scale as organic.

But it has also created a new player: Global South content factories exploiting issues they don’t even understand, driven not by ideology but by profit alone.

The Economics 

The deeper story of the past decade may not be this consequence of AI’s rapid rise, but the economics of increasing global inequality and poverty.

AI didn’t create the economic gap, but it has supercharged it, facilitating entirely new ways to monetize it within a dysfunctional financial system increasingly built around attention and extraction.

Across much of the Global South, high-earning opportunities are far scarcer than in Western markets, where that digital audience can also be monetized lucratively from remote.

At the same time, the digital economy is expanding rapidly, especially across the developing world, which is projected to grow by 3 percent (page 6) in 2026, compared to about 1.7 percent GDP (page 6) for advanced economies. In developing nations, 1.2 billion young people will reach working age over the next decade. 

That means an exceptionally large pool of emerging nation workers looking for economic opportunity in their accelerating digital economies, from creator businesses and online advertising to an increasingly industrialized cybercrime marketplace.

And the regional earnings disparity explains why: One Pakistani creator said US, United Kingdom, and Canadian audiences could earn $6–$30 per 1,000 views, versus about 40 cents in Pakistan.

The New Business Model

Creators use AI to make Western political content without speaking the language, understanding the politics, or caring who wins. The goal is only to find what triggers outrage — and make more of it.

Global poverty is changing the economics of outrage by an order of magnitude:

• Political actors manufacture it to advance an agenda.
• State-linked operations foment it to advance influence.
• Impoverished content creators in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria produce it because it pays.

The result is a political information system where organized money, foreign influence, and profit-driven AI content make all this manufactured outrage look like genuine public opinion. That is the global rage economy.

The Evidence

A 2025 investigation into a Sri Lankan commercial network identified 128 Facebook pages and groups targeting the UK, collectively reaching more than 1.5 million followers. 

Journalists Meriem Mahdhi, Niamh McIntyre, and Mark Sellman linked the network to an online academy run by Geeth Sooriyapura, who teaches others how to produce this content.

Political scientist Aengus Bridgman fact-checked nearly 6,000 posts from a network of spam news pages targeting Canada. Fifty-four percent contained false or unsupported claims.

The Deeper Issues

The deeper problem isn’t sophisticated political deception. It’s complete indifference to truth. Inflammatory content that gets engagement survives. The rest disappears.

The barriers to entering this ecosystem effectively vanished when AI enabled unrestricted researching, writing, translating, and producing images, voices, and video in minutes.

The Monetization Machine (Digital WMD)

Then, in 2024, Facebook created a social media “weapon of mass destruction”: its Content Monetization Program, allowing creators to earn advertising revenue directly from videos, photos, and text. Nearly 16.2 million accounts are now enrolled.

And in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg’s own “natural engagement pattern” exposed the underlying problem: The closer content gets to the platform’s moderation threshold, the more engagement it generates. AI now makes it possible to produce that exact kind of borderline content at enormous scale.

The Rage Supply Chain

So the system now looks like this:

• A smaller, organic community of local citizens debates real political issues.
• Political money manufactures outrage.
• Foreign influence operations weaponize it.
• AI mass-produces the content.
• Algorithms amplify it.
• In an impoverished Global South, that content becomes a path out of poverty.

The political rage economy has become a valuable global commodity within the modern economic system — and the people now manufacturing it for a living may be giving us an early glimpse of where the West is heading.

The most consequential new rage producers may be people thousands of miles from the political battles they exploit, who don’t understand the fight or care who wins. They’re there for the money.

The Profiteers

But the most troubling fact is that: Ellison’s TikTok (for English, click upper right hand icon) Zuckerberg’s META, and Musk’s X could easily shut down the effects of these illegitimate actors with prominent location and AI identifiers. They don’t, because the more unregulated access they give to professional provocateurs, the more engagement and profit these companies get.

What Comes Next

And with current trends, the supply of poverty-driven digital provocateurs is growing faster than our ability to understand them or regulate the technology enabling their actions.

If the Global South shows what happens when financial insecurity collides with the attention economy in a shrinking labor market, it may prove more consequential and predictive of the West’s future than AI itself.

Hashtag Picks

The Like Button Helped Social Media Put Profit Over People. We Can’t Let AI Do the Same.

From Tech Policy Press: “From the affordability crisis to the opioid epidemic to sensationalist media, most of the world’s big problems trace back to our misaligned economy. What happens when we let AI loose in this system? It will magnify the worst aspects of society. Already over-used resources will be exhausted. Technology will become hyper-addictive. Livelihoods will be destroyed. Struggling communities will be sacrificed in the name of marginal gains. Just like social media, AI must be regulated. But restrictions only protect us so much.” 

Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI: September 2026

From Anthropic: “Over the past eight months, our Threat Intelligence team identified and disrupted operations in which threat actors tried to use Claude for malicious activity. In this report, we share case studies from those operations and describe how malicious use of Claude has evolved since our previous threat reports in March, August, and November 2025. In each case, we disrupted the activity, used what we learned to strengthen our safeguards, and shared intelligence with authorities and industry partners, where appropriate.”

AI Researchers Warn Companies Rushing Self-Improving Systems Despite Safety Risks

The author writes, “Current and former OpenAI and Google DeepMind researchers warn companies are doing too little to protect the world against the potentially disastrous fallout of building self-improving AI systems that could outpace humans’ ability to control them. In video testimonials collected by AI safety ‌nonprofit Palisade Research and shared exclusively with Reuters, employees said their concerns about existential risk were sincere, not marketing. They also said AI labs celebrated employees building new models more than those who urge caution.”

Inside a Conservative Operation to Hijack Your Social-Media Feed

The author writes, “A service run from Latvia offers payment for short, social-media-friendly clips designed to look like grassroots GOP support.” 

The Global South’s Digital Future Must Not Belong To Bezos and Musk

From Al Jazeera: “Satellite internet can close the digital divide, but the Global South must not trade access for dependence on foreign corporations.” 

‘People Are Pissed Off’: Anger at the Elite and the Establishment Is Fueling This Year’s Midterms

The author writes, “Headlines from this year’s midterm primaries have ping-ponged back and forth — between major wins for progressives and moderates in Democratic races, defeats and victories for big money, and tests of Trump’s power over the Republican party. But on the campaign trail in contested Democratic primaries throughout the midwest, I found that attempts to tease out ideological trend lines obscured a deeper reality. More than any factional battle between one wing of a party over another, this year’s midterm primary elections is punctuated by a profound dissatisfaction with the political status quo.” 

Americans’ Opinion of Economy Drops To Lowest Level Since 2014

The author writes, “Americans’ confidence in the economy sank to the lowest level in more than a decade this month as prices remain elevated and wages stagnate amid the ongoing Iran war. The Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index tumbled 6.7 points to 81.9 in September, down from 88.6 in August. That’s the lowest reading in the board’s survey since April 2014 and below the lowest level reached during the pandemic.”