Over the weekend, thousands of TikTok and Twitter users were up in arms over a fairly outrageous video from a seemingly oblivious soccer mom who crashed her SUV into a bank’s traffic poles and couldn’t figure out the reason for their existence.


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“Bank owners, look what your yellow pole did to my car, and I didn’t think it was my fault,” she cries before showing viewers the side of her SUV, which has been scratched and scraped to hell and back, complete with a handlebar that’s falling off. She goes on to share her tale of woe, revealing that she did nearly $30,000 worth of damage to her car. She again asks what the point of those yellow poles is before adding, “I can’t be the only one that doesn’t see them.”



Videos like this definitely scratch an itch people have to feel outraged at the stupidity of strangers — rage-bait is a thing for a reason — so the backlash was swift and immediate, with the video netting 3.6 million views on TikTok and allegedly 10.7 million views on Twitter. There were thousands of calls for her to lose her license, and many more people pointing out that drivers like her are the reason those poles exist in the first place.


Maybe I’m incredibly jaded, but when I see a video about something this monumentally stupid that’s doing numbers online, my instinct is to assume that it’s engagement or rage-bait. Occam’s razor comes into play a bit here, too. Which is more likely: That someone did $30,000 worth of damage to their car and then tried to blame the stationary object they ran into, or that someone’s car was damaged in another way and they saw an opportunity to make a video that would piss millions of people off and earn them views?



The woman’s follow-up video is specifically tagged #satire so as to avoid any confusion, and features her responding to the video as if it isn’t her video, opening with, “Saw the video of that girl on TikTok that hit the yellow pole at the bank,” before going on to “play devil’s advocate.”



An increasingly popular refrain online is that men (but plenty of other women, too) will assume a woman is stupid before they assume she’s being funny, and while videos like this aren’t as obviously satirical as the video in the tweet above, there are enough signs to give us pause, assuming we remember that women are capable of making jokes, too.


Either way, if you’re tired of blatant engagement bait, it really is as easy as no longer engaging with it.