moral panic

plural moral panics

1. A semi-spontaneous or media-generated mass movement based on the perception that an individual, group, community, or culture is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society; a public outcry.

   None of this is new. Moral panics, accompanied by calls for a return to a simpler age, once greeted the advent of frightening “new technologies” such as telephones and trains.

   2024 May 21, Matthew Reisz, “Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Foster review – the past isn’t a foreign place”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

   4 more examples

   The psychotherapist Marty Klein likens the current moral panic around online porn to the epidemics of fear and suspicion that sprung up around satanic cults in the 1980s, and even around comic books in the 1950s.

   2016 July 2, Sophie Gilbert, “Is Moral Panic About Online Porn Misplaced?”, in The Atlantic

   But maybe the very obscurity of this genuine critical race theory is the point: before it became the object of the American right’s latest moral panic, few people had heard of critical race theory, and even fewer understood what it really was.

   2021 June 17, Moira Donegan, “What the moral panic about ‘critical race theory’ is about”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

   Moral panics have existed since well before the Salem witch trials — perhaps the paradigm case. But thanks in part to social media, they are increasing in number and changing in nature.

   2023 June 29, Pamela Paul, “Do Not Panic. It’s Just a Moral Panic.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   It may come as some relief to hear, then, that for every alarmist headline there are plenty of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers who believe this moral panic is unfounded.

   2025 January 29, Amy Fleming, “All in the mind? The surprising truth about brain rot”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

   Synonyms: social panic