Meta and TikTok knowingly turned ragebait into revenue, whistleblowers claim

A new BBC documentary claims that insiders at major social media companies warned their employers about the dangers of harmful content being promoted on their platforms, but say the risks were tolerated in pursuit of engagement and growth.

Inside the Rage Machine features interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees from companies including Meta and TikTok.

According to the BBC, the whistleblowers describe how senior managers appeared to be aware of potential harms caused by recommendation algorithms and moderation policies.

While tech companies claim that algorithms are designed to better help users hone their interests and needs, the researchers the BBC spoke to revealed how it tends to surface a lot of conspiracy theories, AI slop, deepfakes, and pro-Nazi content.

While in most cases this is not illegal, so-called ragebait content is designed to provoke a strong response from the user and thus raises engagement.

One Meta engineer told the BBC that staff had been instructed to allow more “borderline” material – including misogynistic posts and conspiracy theories – to remain visible in the feeds in order to compete with tech rival TikTok.

“They told us it was because their stock price is down,” the engineer said.

The BBC claims it was also given rare access to internal dashboards used by TikTok’s trust and safety teams to track user complaints.

The data suggested that some cases involving politicians were prioritized over reports of harm affecting young users.The whistleblowers said that this was done to curry favor with politicians and thus avoid regulation or bans.

This included evidence that a complaint involving a political figure who got compared to a chicken was treated as higher priority than cases involving a 17-year-old reporting cyberbullying or 16-year-old girl who reported fake sexualized images of herself were circulating on the platform.

The documentary features a TikTok trust and safety employee, identified only as “Nick” who told the BBC the volume of cases facing moderators made it difficult to protect users effectively.

“If you’re feeling guilty on a daily basis because of what you are instructed to do, at some point you can decide, should I say something?”

"Nick” a TikTok trust and safety employee

The documentary also features testimony from former Meta researcher Matt Motyl, who shared internal research suggesting Instagram Reels, introduced to compete with TikTok, initially had significantly higher levels of harmful comments than other parts of Instagram.

According to research cited by the BBC, Reels posts showed 75% more bullying and harassment and 19% more hate speech and 7% more violence or incitement than posts on the main feed.

The allegations made to the BBC mirror earlier claims including those made by senior executive Sarah Wynn Williams, a former Meta (Facebook) director of global public policy who said that the tech firm targeted advertisements at 13-to17-year-olds based on their emotional states, identifying when they felt "worthless or helpless" to serve them ads.

In her 2025 memoir, Careless People: a cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism – which Facebook tried to block her from promoting – Sarah Wynn-Williams repeated allegations that she also made in front of the US Senate last year, that Facebook worked "hand in glove" with the Chinese government to build censorship tools to gain entry to the market.

In the BBC documentary, which airs on UK TV on Monday, and is available on the broadcaster’s streaming platform iPlayer, Meta disputed the allegations, adding that it had also introduced new teen account protections and parental controls.

TikTok also denied the allegations and rejected suggestions that political cases were prioritized over child safety.

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