Rebecca Black’s “Friday” kicked off the ragebait era

Rebecca Black’s “Friday” didn’t invent being nasty online. The theorem that online anonymity breeds rude behavior was commonplace well before Black’s parents paid Ark Music Factory a few thousand dollars to craft a song and music video for their daughter to record. And the message-board-born concept of a “lolcow,” a gullible user who can be goaded into making a fool of themselves on a regular basis, definitely predated the music video.

Even outside of dank subforums, internet denizens had laughed at unfortunate uploads of the “Star Wars Kid,” a 15-year-old who spun a fake light saber to online infamy in 2003, and Britney Spears’ mega-defender Cara Cunningham. Comedian Daniel Tosh even parlayed a desire to gawk at the web’s inept and unaware into a vicious update of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” that aired on Comedy Central for years. 

But the internet was a somewhat separate place from the real world in 2011, and the utopian glow of the web hadn’t quite been snuffed out completely when Black uploaded her viral-for-all-the-wrong-reasons music video to YouTube 15 years ago this week. 

The song and music video — which, let us note, were written, storyboarded and shot by adults — are both bad, but not overwhelmingly so. The melody in the chorus shows a glimmer of hook-writing ability. The verses would be passable if not for the unremarkable “day in the life” lyrics. Overall, the song sounds like a recession-pop riff on Eddie Murphy’s bit about trying his own Richard Pryor-style stand-up as a child, when his only life experience was going to the bathroom. 

It was a boost from the blog for Tosh’s show that launched Black’s video to infamy. The pile-on proceeded to break comment section containment, spreading into blogs, magazines and network TV talk shows. The catty media site Gawker noted that corners of the internet like 4Chan could be expected to respond with heinous pranks, without realizing how vile the rhetoric of regular people was about to get. 

The malevolent attention paid to Black’s stilted pop song reached levels no internet phenomenon had ever encountered. Google ranked Black the fastest-rising search term of the entire year in 2011. (The only other people in the top five were then-murder suspect Casey Anthony and former “Jackass” star Ryan Dunn, who had died in a high-speed drunk-driving accident in June.) And when users found her ode to being excited for the weekend, they showered the teenager with hateful comments. Years before the digital shaming of people like Justine Sacco, who shot to worldwide fame in 2013 after posting a racist tweet, Black bore the brunt of an unprecedented backlash. 

“2011 wasn’t necessarily even that long ago, but people didn’t hold themselves to the responsibility they do now, and they definitely didn’t hold other people responsible,” Black told Paper in 2020. “[The internet] wasn’t developed enough to maybe understand that every person has a real world and life behind that video. I don’t think a lot of people realized how young I was. But in hindsight, I can’t imagine anyone looking back and feeling good that they made fun of a 13-year-old.”

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We’re not so sure. In the years since “Friday” was released, Donald Trump’s willingness to toss aside political norms and decorum to offer pure, uncut rage to his base has resonated across increasingly conservative echo chambers on social media. When the president gives the OK by mocking a disabled reporter or trashing the families of deceased military veterans, going after a child doesn’t seem too far beyond the pale.  

Online etiquette has shifted, sure. And the established discourse cycle does mean that any backlash to a bad song is going to be met with a backlash to the backlash. In the years since Black achieved notoriety, a single unknown artist is unlikely to reach universal derision in 2026 — but internet pile-ons are just as popular as they’ve always been. 

Ragebait has diffused across the structure of the current internet, becoming so omnipresent that the Oxford English Dictionary made it their word of the year for 2025. No platform is safe from the cheap heat of a cortisol-spiking video. Posts on Bluesky catalog fascist creep for an audience of suitably horrified liberals. On Elon Musk’s X, influencers like Libs of Tik Tok carry on in the spirit of 2011 by tossing the supposedly “woke” antics of everyday people to an MAGA audience that’s suspiciously eager to get angry. 

“Friday” has become a relic of pop, virality and how we once used the internet. But the impulses it revealed are now the dominant mode of our online existence.

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