https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920912257
International Journal of Cultural Studies
2020, Vol. 23(6) 840­–859
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1367877920912257
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Social media and moral
panics: Assessing the effects
of technological change on
societal reaction
James P Walsh
University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada
Abstract
Answering calls for deeper consideration of the relationship between moral panics and emergent
media systems, this exploratory article assesses the effects of social media – web-based venues
that enable and encourage the production and exchange of user-generated content. Contra claims
of their empowering and deflationary consequences, it finds that, on balance, recent technological
transformations unleash and intensify collective alarm. Whether generating fear about social
change, sharpening social distance, or offering new opportunities for vilifying outsiders, distorting
communications, manipulating public opinion, and mobilizing embittered individuals, digital
platforms and communications constitute significant targets, facilitators, and instruments of panic
production. The conceptual implications of these findings are considered.
Keywords
digital technologies, folk devils, moral panic, public communication, social media, social
problems construction, societal reaction
Popularized in Cohen’s study of youthful hooliganism in post-war Britain, ‘moral panic’
constitutes a keyword in social-scientific studies of crime, deviance, and control.
Referring to episodes where folk devils – moral outlaws and ‘visible reminders of what
we should not be’ (Cohen, 2002 [1972]: 2) – are blamed for societal malaise, the term
captures how ‘right-thinking’ actors transmute deviant outsiders into potent sources of
Corresponding author:
James P Walsh, Assistant Professor of Criminology, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University
Ontario Institute of Technology, 2000 Simcoe Street North, Oshawa, ON L1H 7K4, Canada.
Email: james.walsh@uoit.ca
912257ICS0010.1177/1367877920912257International Journal of Cultural StudiesWalsh
research-article2020
Original Article
Walsh	 841
anxious indignation. For many, the framework’s leading contribution was illuminating
the media’s significant role in constructing and amplifying social problems (Critcher,
2003; Jewkes, 2015; Kidd-Hewitt and Osborne, 1995). For Cohen and his peers, panics
represented media events, with journalists and broadcasters playing an essential role in
identifying aberrant behaviour and mobilizing consensus and concern.
While the concept’s influence endures, seismic shifts in media space – the rise of social
media and digital platforms – broaden access to information and are transforming the
production of public knowledge. Given panics’ status as struggles over the boundaries of
order, truth, and normality, such developments ‘pose some of the most interesting contemporary
questions for moral panic theory’ (Falkof, 2018: 4). Reflecting appeals from several
of the framework’s leading proponents (Critcher, 2017; Goode and Ben-Yehuda,
2010; Hay and Hall, 2013), Falkof (2018: 4–5) has argued that, to retain moral panic’s
conceptual utility, scholars must interrogate how social media are ‘upend[ing] traditional
. . . flows of information and power’. Despite repeated calls for deeper engagement with
technological changes (Critcher, 2017; Mawby and Gisby, 2009), existing work has either
remained silent or under-represented their diverse effects. Concerning the former outcome,
in his recent research note, Hier (2018: 9) claims that moral panic scholars have
neglected digital communications and continue to privilege mass-broadcasting in their
analyses. When technological change is discussed, received accounts are partial and
incomplete. Informed by McRobbie and Thornton’s (1995) influential discussion of
‘multi-mediated social worlds’, it is held that the fragmentation and multiplication of
media systems – dynamics accelerated by ubiquitous online platforms – are diversifying
information about public issues and broadening claims-making capacities, outcomes
which empower alternative voices and render Cohen’s framework ‘inaccurate and unuseful’
(Krinsky, 2013: 9; cf. Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2010: 98–100).
When viewed from the standpoint of the present, both perspectives contain significant
omissions. One the one hand, eliding socio-technical changes promotes a static, universal
model that smooths out complexity and encourages intellectual inertia. Conversely,
critiques of Cohen’s framework neglect its continued relevance and are incommensurate
with contemporary realities. Evinced in an upsurge of authoritarian populism that hinges
on the scapegoating of despised others, affluent societies appear wracked by unremitting
fear and resentment (Tiffen, 2019; Wright, 2017), conditions that, as argued below, are
inseparable from changes in media. Accordingly, rather than jettisoning the moral panic
concept or subjecting it to ‘ritualistic reproductions’ (Kidd-Hewitt and Osborne, 1995:
4), Cohen’s framework should be refined to consider how digital communications shape
reactions and are appropriated to incite alarm.
Reflecting such concerns, this article surveys social media’s effects on the issues and
claims-making patterns that propel moral panics. It argues that, whether generating anxiety
about social change, sharpening social distance, or offering new opportunities for
vilifying outsiders, distorting communications, manipulating public opinion, and mobilizing
embittered individuals, digital platforms and communications constitute significant
targets, facilitators, and instruments of panic production. Accentuating such
dynamics is not intended to dismiss received perspectives but to invigorate them, promoting
more holistic consideration of the implications of new media. To be sure, a handful
of works have provided commentary on or case studies of social media and cognate
842	 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(6)
technologies (for example, see Flores-Yeffal et al., 2019; Hier, 2018; Marwick, 2008;
Wright, 2017). Despite their insight and contributions, knowledge of social media’s
diverse effects remains scattered and fragmentary. Thus, while some of this article’s
propositions can be gleaned from existing studies, it offers a systematic elaboration that
aims to promote analytic balance and encourage productive exchanges that can orient
future scholarship.
After revisiting the media–moral panic relationship, this article assesses how social
media escalate the frequency and intensity of overwrought reactions. While addressing
several concrete examples, particularly the role of digital communications in promoting
extremist agendas, as recent events concerning Trumpism, Brexit, the alt-right, and ‘fake
news’ have shattered myths regarding their positive and empowering qualities, the focus
of this article is more on general claims than particular findings. Accordingly, rather than
a final, definitive statement, it presents developmental suggestions and a heuristic that
can, and should, be subjected to further scrutiny and debate. In the end, such preliminary
efforts are significant as ‘before we can pose questions of explanation, we must be aware
of the character of the phenomenon we wish to explain’ (Smelser, 1963: 5).
Changes in media space: the rise of ‘multi-mediated
social worlds’
While the identification and policing of deviance are perennial features of human
groups, moral panics are ‘unthinkable without the media’ and are distinctive to modern,
mass societies (Critcher, 2003: 131). In many respects, Cohen and his contemporaries
(Cohen and Young, 1973; Hall et al., 1978; Pearson, 1983) were the first to
articulate the essential role of news-making in constructing social problems. Beyond
generating surplus visibility and making otherwise marginal behaviours appear pernicious
and pervasive, the media represent an independent voice (Goode and BenYehuda,
2010). By delineating moral boundaries and circulating dire predictions about
monstrous others, the histrionic tenor of reporting sensitizes audiences, culminating in
hardened sentiment and unbridled punitiveness (Wright, 2015). Moreover, coverage
translates ‘stereotypes into actuality’, elevating the actual and perceived severity of
deviance (Young, 1971: 11). Here, identifying affronts to moral order triggers virulent
hostility, further marginalizing folk devils and amplifying their deviant attachments
and identities. As a control culture is institutionalized, surveillance and intervention
intensify, exposing additional deviance, confirming popular stereotypes and justifying
further crackdowns (Garland, 2008).
Since Cohen’s research nearly a half-century ago, media systems have undergone
sweeping transformation, leading many to question the continued relevance of his work.
A particularly influential critique in these regards comes from McRobbie and Thornton
(1995). For them (1995: 560), Cohen’s emphasis on mass-broadcasting and its social and
institutional correlates – a univocal press, hierarchical information flows, monolithic
audiences – is untenable in the context of ‘multi-mediated social worlds’.1
Specifically,
it is held that the proliferation of media sources encourages exposure to alternative, if not
dissenting, claims and reactions, ensuring that ‘hard and fast boundaries between
Walsh	 843
‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ are less common’ (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995; 572–3; cf.
Tiffen, 2019). Moreover, expanded access to media technologies – portable camcorders,
personal computers, editing software and so one – broadens the remit of expression, giving
rise to media sources inflected with the interests of marginalized groups (Coleman
and Ross, 2010). Able to ‘produce their own media’ and defended by ‘niche and micromedia’(McRobbie
and Thornton, 1995: 568), folk devils are no longer powerless victims
andcan‘fightback’(McRobbie,1994;cf.deYoung,2013;Thornton,1995).Consequently,
deviant outsiders and their supporters display greater capacity to contest and short-circuit
panicked reactions, outcomes that render the success of moral crusades ‘much less certain’
(McRobbie and Thornton, 1995: 573).
Focused on the diversification of conventional media space, McRobbie and
Thornton conducted their stock-taking precisely as media systems were being further
destabilized. With the onset of the 21st century, digital platforms not only underpin but
also constitute social life in affluent societies, with individuals’ identities and relations
at least partly cultivated through computing infrastructures (Lupton, 2018). Among the
most significant manifestations of ‘digital societies’ are social media. Whether as
social networking (Facebook), micro-blogging (Twitter), or photo – (Instagram) and
video-sharing (YouTube) sites, social media have profoundly reconfigured the production
and exchange of information. As ‘many-to-many’systems of communication, they
promote vernacular discourse and creativity, permitting ordinary users to produce and
distribute staggering quantities of ‘user-generated content’ (Keane, 2013; Yar, 2014).2
Digital platforms are also displacing the mass media as an information source.3
Finally,
as loosely coupled networks of users, their structure not only promotes virality – the
rapid and unpredictable diffusion of content – but also fosters an expansive virtual
sociality (Baym, 2015; boyd, 2010). Here, various attributes – ‘likes’, ‘retweets’,
hashtags (#), mentions (@) and so on – index and anchor communications, promoting
awareness of others and uniting spatially dispersed users into communities of shared
interest and identity (Murthy, 2013).
While McRobbie and Thornton could not have anticipated these momentous shifts,
contemporary scholarship assumes, either overtly or implicitly, that their corrective
remains as, if not more, relevant today (for example, see Carlson, 2015; Carrabine, 2008;
Fischel, 2016; Marres, 2017). With information control representing a critical axis of
power, social media are frequently depicted as an elite-challenging ‘microphone for the
masses’ (Murthy, 2011; cf. Gerbaudo, 2018; Jenkins, 2006. Here, the accessibility and
sophistication of digital platforms is believed to empower ordinary citizens to make their
own news, name issues as public concerns, and shape collective sentiment (Coleman and
Ross, 2010; Turner, 2010). With knowledge production and image-making increasingly
steered by non-experts, many perceive citizen journalism as breeding accounts of reality
rooted in public-mindedness rather than sensationalism or commercial considerations
(Goode, 2009). In light of such developments, noted panic scholars claim digital media
are shifting ‘the locus of definitional power’, ensuring ‘more voices are heard’ (Critcher,
2017) and generating ‘new possibilities for resistance’(Lindgren, 2013: 1243). Thus, the
increasingly nodal configuration of media space has attenuated moral guardians’ influence,
ensuring that panics are ‘more likely to be blunted and scattered among competing
narratives’ (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2010: 99; cf. le Grand, 2016).
844	 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(6)
Moral panics and new media: reconsidering the
relationship
While McRobbie and Thornton’s claims remain influential, their ability to convincingly
order the evidence is considerably more limited than recent analysis suggests. In accentuating
social media’s progressive consequences – information pluralism and robust
opportunities for citizens to access the public sphere and defuse frenzied reactions –
existing scholarship neglects how digital platforms are ‘underdetermined’ and doubleedged
(Monahan, 2010). Informed by such issues, the following offers a counterpoint,
detailing how social media’s affordances intensify the proclivity to panic. Whether as
objects of unease, sources of acrimonious division, or venues for staging moral contests,
on balance, contemporary media systems promote febrile anxiety.
Social media as an object of anxiety
Changing communicative and informational conditions frequently incite moral restiveness.
As Cohen himself intimates (2002 [1972]: xvii), societies are regularly gripped by
fears that, if improperly governed, new media will have deleterious effects on younger
generations. The latest iteration of so-called ‘media’ (Drotner, 1999) or ‘techno-panics’
(Marwick, 2008), reactions to social media encapsulate deep-seated anxieties about
social change and the types of people it begets.
Like prior episodes involving ‘dangerous’ media, including ‘penny dreadfuls’, pinball
machines, comic books and ‘video nasties’, youth are ambivalently constructed as
threatened and threatening (Springhall, 1998). While anxieties have surfaced around
vulnerability stemming from, inter alia, online predators, sexting, cyber-bullying, and
exposure to violent and pornographic content (Barak, 2005; Gabriel, 2014; Lynch,
2002; Milosevic, 2015), youth are also positioned as undisciplined and pathological,
with social media branded a leading culprit. Alongside being blamed for moral failings
– obesity, addiction, disengagement, cultural vacuity, solipsism (Baym, 2015; Thurlow,
2006; Szablewicz, 2010) – multi-media platforms have been linked to violent criminality.
Whether in relation to video game violence, the possibility of obtaining information
about weaponry and prior incidents, or the promise of celebrity immortality
offered through documenting their grievances and attacks, digital media have been
maligned for encouraging school shootings and associated massacres (Ruddock, 2013;
Sternheimer, 2014).4
Further, during the 2011 England riots, journalists and politicians
referenced BlackBerry and Twitter ‘mobs’, claiming teenage gangs employed digital
communications to evade authorities, publicize lawlessness and coordinate anti-social
behaviour (Crump, 2011; Fuchs, 2013).
Such fears have frequently culminated in attempts by adult society to intensify
surveillance, censorship, and control over online platforms. For such crusaders, who
often utilize the very technologies they condemn to whip up outrage, techno-panics
provide an alibi for manning the ‘moral barricades’ and reasserting the hegemony of
their values (Sternheimer, 2014). Thus, while they may empower grassroots actors
and disturb social hierarchies, technological changes equally engender moral backlash
and nostalgia.
Walsh	 845
Social media as a facilitator of division and hostility
Social media also reconfigure the external environment wherein panics occur. Frequently
valorized for encouraging connectedness and encounters with diverse others, upon closer
inspection digital platforms exert centripetal force, producing ‘filter bubbles’ (Pariser,
2011) and ‘information silos’ (McIntyre, 2018) which narrow social horizons and
increase the likelihood of engaging with affective, and often acerbic, content. As news is
increasingly digitally mediated, such dynamics reveal, pace McRobbie and Thornton
(1995), there is no one-to-one correspondence between media and message pluralism.
Able to curate content at the expense of professional gatekeepers, social media allow
users to construct information ecologies that are personalized and restricted (Sunstein,
2018). Such outcomes are exacerbated by social media’s ‘aggregative functionalities’
(Gerbaudo, 2018): the use of promotional algorithms to deliver tailored content (Rogers,
2013). For example, by assessing the volume of ‘clicks’ (likes, shares, mentions, etc.)
communications receive, Facebook’s customized news feed determines what is worthy
of users’ attention, filtering out stories deviating from extrapolations of their interests
and preferences (McIntyre, 2018). As this and related examples suggest, by amplifying
users’ biases and aversions, social media encourage confirmation bias and isomorphic
social relations (Powers, 2017).
Social media also favour content likely to generate significant emotion and outrage.
By promoting communications based on predicted popularity, they prioritize and reward
virality and the intensity of reaction rather than veracity or the public interest (Van Dijck,
2013; Yardi and boyd, 2010). The result is the proliferation of ‘click-bait’, deliberately
sensationalized content that captivates through affective arousal (Vaidhyanathan, 2018).
More significantly, new media systems privilege incendiary communications. Research
suggests that, even for the most staid users, the frisson of disgust is too alluring as content
unleashing fear and anger about out-groups is considerably more likely to garner
attention and ‘trend’ (Berger and Milkman, 2012; Vosoughi et al., 2018).5
These dynamics
ultimately appear contagious as messages’ emotional valence ‘infects’ other users,
influencing their subsequent interactions and escalating bitterness and antipathy within
online environments (Kramer et al., 2014; Stark, 2018).
Together such conditions promote anxious alarm. By allowing users to remain cloistered
within their preferred tribes and visions of reality, digital platforms encourage misrecognition
and distort understanding of social issues, making the acceptance of bloated
rhetoric more likely (Albright, 2017). Accordingly, they obstruct heterogeneous interactions
and exposure to opposing perspectives, dynamics long identified as precluding the
root causes of panics – intolerance and hostility (Murthy, 2013). Finally, by inflating the
visibility of inflammatory content, social media mobilize animosity towards common
enemies and transform uneasy concern into full-blown panic.
Social media as instruments of panic production
Alongside breeding fissiparous societies, multi-media platforms can be wielded to engineer
crises. Historically, panics require the mass media to generate sufficient concern and
indignation. Social media expand the pathways of panic production. As detailed below,
846	 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(6)
by allowing ordinary netizens to identify and sanction transgression, they unleash participatory,
crowd-sourced panics. Additionally, as architectures of amplification, their
structural features can be commandeered to promote moral contests that are surreptitious,
automated, and finely calibrated in their transmission and targeting.
Participatory panics
Conventional wisdom suggests that panics are spearheaded by seasoned and advantageously
positioned activists and elites. By expanding capacities of media production and
distribution, digital communications permit citizens to directly publicize issues and promote
collective action. Typically this has been associated with amateur news-making and
attempts to document injustice and promote transparency and accountability (Coleman
and Ross, 2010; Walsh, 2019a; Yar, 2014), but scholars have recently documented opposing
trends, where social media are appropriated to define and enforce public morality. As
lay actors increasingly participate in the exposure and sanctioning of deviance, distinctions
between the media, the public and moral entrepreneurs are blurring, ensuring that
panics stem from unorthodox sources and display new discursive and interactional
contours.
On the one hand, social media enable micro-crusades that, while lacking broad public
appeal and support, are sustained by dispersed groups of devoted and technologically
equipped citizens. Whether employed to advance claims that Harry Potter promotes
Satanism and the occult to impressionable youth (Sternheimer, 2014) or discredit public
officials and assert a link between vaccinations and autism (Erbschloe, 2018), digital
environments offer optimal arenas for uniting the conspiratorial. Given their accessibility
and ease-of-use, they obviate the need for elite participation, promoting patterns of
mobilization around issues where all citizens potentially emerge as crusaders (Hier,
2018). Moreover, social media’s ‘mob-ocratic’ tendencies can activate collective effervescence
(Gerbaudo, 2018), producing panics driven by mass collaboration. Falling into
this category are online ‘firestorms’ (Johnen et al., 2018), spontaneous and electric outbursts
where the documentation and exposure of moral breaches – petty theft, public
outbursts, drug use, sexual promiscuity, etc. – are rapidly disseminated, igniting interactive
cascades of denigration (Trottier, 2018; Wright, 2017). Such episodes often culminate
in digital vigilantism: forms of extra-judicial punitiveness – ostracism, doxing,
harassment, job loss, physical attacks, death threats – that emerge from below (Powell
et al., 2018; Trottier, 2017).6
Consequently, alongside increasing the frequency and
velocity of panics, online environments appear to promote heightened virulence and
excoriation. While underpinned by emergent technologies, forms of digitally mediated
opprobrium are inseparable from late-modern social conditions as they offer a palliative
for ontological precarity and allow otherwise atomized individuals to police social
boundaries (Ingraham and Reeves, 2016; cf. Bauman, 2013).
Architectures of amplification
Beyond expanding the profile of moral entrepreneurs, the networked and digital configuration
of social media can also be marshalled to distort information flows, promote
Walsh	 847
incendiary content, and channel user experience and engagement. In such instances,
digital platforms constitute architectures of amplification that allow interested parties to
punch well above their weight.
‘Attention hacking’ and media manipulation. On the one hand, digital platforms permit
highly energized and sustained groups to sculpt public sentiment by maximizing the visibility
of ‘information pollution’ and ‘fake news’ – arresting, sensational and morally
tinged content designed to distort and agitate (Kalsnes, 2018). Whether by steering communications,
creating fake accounts, or exploiting digital interactions, techniques of
‘attention hacking’ can strategically influence engagement patterns and produce wildly
disproportionate effects (Marwick and Lewis, 2017). Ultimately, by allowing users to
eliminate ambiguity and delineate moral boundaries in publicly visible ways, sites like
Twitter and Facebook generate new types of agency that can rapidly propel the ideas and
identities of various outsiders into prominence (Joosse, 2018).7
With their cacophonous character making it difficult to vet the integrity of content,
digital platforms have been inundated with captivating, tendentious and skewed, if not
entirely spurious, communications (news stories, videos, memes, blog posts, hashtags,
etc.) to distort online conversations and mobilize receptive users. An exemplary case of
digitally mediated crusades appeared during the 2016 American election as dedicated
members of the ‘alt-right’, as well as digital mercenaries employed by the Internet
Research Agency (IRA), a Russia-backed ‘troll farm’, devoted considerable energy and
resources to shaping political communication and behaviour. Central to their efforts was
the creation, sharing, liking and promotion of misinformation and provocative discourse
about contentious sociocultural issues, including race relations, gun control, abortion,
Islamophobia and men’s rights (Bradshaw and Howard, 2017; Nagle, 2017; Singer and
Brooking, 2018).8
Armed with an appreciation of digital platforms’ value in shifting the
parameters of public discourse, such actors succeeded in generating virality, obtaining
mainstream press coverage, and inciting considerable outcry and anxiety (Phillips, 2018).
More recently, the role of digital communication in spreading fake news and inciting
panic was on full display in initial reactions to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), an
infectious respiratory disease of zoonotic origin. Following its emergence in Wuhan,
China in January 2020, widespread scapegoating and fear-mongering erupted across
social media. In relation to the former, the virus was racialized, with numerous messages
linking it to the ostensibly exotic dietary practices and unsanitary behaviour of
Chinese populations, with representations depicting them as folk devils and dangerous,
impure others (Yang, 2020).9
Reflecting a ‘politics of substitution’(Jenkins, 1992), such
claims-making diverted attention from considerably more deadly (and preventable) diseases
(e.g. malaria), as well as, the structural conditions – media censorship, political
corruption, weakly enforced health and safety standards – underlying the emergence
and rapid spread of the disease. Digital platforms were also used to circulate misinformation
and dire, if not apocalyptic, predictions with various rumours – whether false
reports of positive cases and contaminated Chinese imports, stories of individuals
absconding from quarantine zones, or claims that the virus was a bioweapon developed
by the Chinese or American governments – outpacing official information during the
early stages of the outbreak (Bogle, 2020). By contributing to a broader climate of
848	 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(6)
suspicion, such communications appear to be reactivating fears of a ‘yellow peril’, as
well as producing emergency measures (enhanced surveillance, quarantines, travel bans
etc.) and everyday expressions of racism and anti-Chinese sentiment (Dingwall, 2020;
Palmer, 2020; Yang, 2020). As this example reveals, like prior epidemics (SARS, AIDS,
etc.) where media coverage promoted fear and opprobrium about various outsiders (gay
men, drug users, foreigners; see Muzzatti, 2005; Ungar, 2013; Watney, 1997), digital
communications also play a significant role in distorting understanding and encouraging
over-reaction. The episode equally suggests, however, that social media’s anonymous,
horizontal structure ensures that messages travel exponentially faster, lack clear
origins and feature palpable vitriol, outcomes that escalate the impetus and excess of
alarm (Miller, 2020).
The spread of information pollution frequently hinges on perceptions of social media
as the embodiment of the vox populi (Gerbaudo, 2018). Here, fake accounts are utilized
to raise awareness and bolster the credibility of favoured content. On the one hand,
advances in artificial intelligence allow bots – machine-led communications tools that
mimic human users and perform simple, structurally repetitive, tasks – to spread ‘computational
propaganda’ (Bradshaw and Howard, 2017; Ferrara et al., 2016). As social
machines and artificial voices, bots automate and accelerate diffusion and engagement,
creating, liking, sharing, and following content at rates vastly surpassing human capabilities.
Thus, they facilitate viral engineering; expanding the momentum of certain
messages and, in the process, altering information flows. To exude authority and authenticity,
content is also circulated by bogus, ‘sockpuppet’ accounts posing as those of
accredited experts (scientists, journalists, etc.) or ordinary citizens belonging to various
groups (women, blue-collar workers, police officers, urban youth, etc.) and appearing
to possess folk wisdom (Bastos and Mercea, 2017; Marwick and Lewis, 2017). Whether
manual or automated, techniques of media manipulation also control narratives by
reducing the visibility of unwanted and objectionable content. Here, keywords and
hashtags affiliated with opposing perspectives can be ‘hijacked’as platforms are flooded
with nonsense or negative messages to disrupt and drown out specific communications,
denuding them of their salience and influence (Woolley and Howard, 2016).
A recent example of such efforts is found in Twitter communications concerning the
intensity of the 2019–20 Australian bushfires, an outcome widely linked to the longer
fire seasons produced by climate change. The preliminary results of research conducted
by Graham and Keller (2020) suggests that, at the height of the crisis, a coordinated
misinformation campaign was waged by a sprawling network of troll and bot accounts to
advance broader narratives of climate denial. By flooding social media with hashtags
like #arsonemergency (in place of #climateemergency) and co-opting those already
trending (e.g. #australiafire, #bushfireaustralia), such actors sought to publicize conspiracies
that criminal elements – whether arsonists, radical environmentalists, or ISIS fighters
– were responsible for the blazes and that climate change is an elite-engineered hoax
and form of population control (Knaus, 2020).
Finally, the propagation of misinformation involves attempts to harness social interaction
and collective sense-making. Studies suggest that distorted, emotionally charged
content is considerably more likely to be shared by ordinary users who unwittingly
enlarge its sphere of influence (Albright, 2017; Tanz, 2017).10
By bearing the imprimatur
Walsh	 849
of whomever shared it, whether a relative, colleague, neighbour, or opinion leader, the
substance of messages is validated and appears authentic as it spreads laterally across
users’ networks (van der Linden, 2017). For instance, on several occasions, accounts
linked to the alt-right and Russian operatives have successfully ‘seeded’content, goading
journalists, bloggers, activists, and politicians (including President Trump) into endorsing
particular communications and providing broader platforms (Phillips, 2018).
Since messages distributed through formal channels and hierarchical apparatuses are
frequently perceived as self-serving and inauthentic, media manipulation provides a
powerful vehicle of promotion. By engineering popularity and relevance, the discursive
swarms unleashed by bots and fake accounts can generate an impression of credibility,
unanimity and common sense, an outcome essential to normalizing particular modes of
thought (Chen, 2015). Ultimately, by concealing the authors and agendas behind communications,
such practices facilitate shadow crusades and astroturfing (Rubin, 2017).
While applicable to numerous topics, digitally mediated crusades are distinctly
prominent in relation to issues – migration, crime and policing, or terrorism – identified
as leading and recurrent sources of panic (Hall et al., 1978; Kidd-Hewitt and
Osborne, 1995; Odartey-Wellington, 2009; Walsh, 2017, 2019c; Welch and Schuster,
2005), as well as, central topics in online conversations during critical political
moments (Benkler et al., 2018; Evolvi, 2019). For instance, in their recent study of
anti-immigrant crusades, Flores-Yeffal et al. (2019) observed how the indexing of
social media communications through hashtags like #IllegalsAreCriminals and
#WakeUpAmerica fostered networked discourses and connectedness, helping to construct
scapegoats, circulate calls for action, and ensure that xenophobic rhetoric echoed
throughout cyber-space (see also Morgan and Shaffer, 2017).11
Additionally,
preceding the Brexit referendum, supporters of the far-right UK Independence Party
utilized digital platforms to trigger and inflate fears about foreigners, circulating contentious
claims about workforce competition, cultural displacement, crime and terrorist
infiltration (Vaidhyanathan, 2018).
Computational crusades. Finally, social media unleash crusades that are data-driven,
granular, and highly dynamic in their transmission and targeting. Here, the digital surveillance
and marketing infrastructures that underpin social media’s profitability permit
computational modelling of user data, promising greater awareness of audiences and
encouraging claims-making practices involving extensive narrowcasting; behavioural
and psychometric profiling; and the production of predictive knowledge.
While empowering users as participants and agents of communication, digital platforms
also render them legible as vast tranches of information about their attributes (e.g.
gender, race, income), activities (e.g. hobbies, movements, browsing habits), and associations
(e.g. relational ties, organizational memberships) are continuously scrutinized
for commercial, legal and political purposes (Nissenbaum, 2009). Once harvested, user
data undergoes deep profiling, producing digital dossiers which sort individuals based on
dozens, and potentially hundreds, of variables. Consequently, audiences are less collectivities
to be influenced en masse, than individually calculable units, arrangements that
permit those possessing the necessary resources and technological literacy to target users
with highly customized messages (Zuboff, 2015).
850	 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(6)
Accompanying geodemographic criteria, algorithms can identify and calculate
expressive energies and subjective orientations – moods, sensibilities, and emotions.
With advances in machine learning and sentiment analysis, digital communications can
be analysed to map meaning structures, and discern personality traits on scales previously
unimaginable (Andrejevic, 2013; Stark, 2018). For example, CambridgeAnalytica,
a consulting firm hired to assist the Trump campaign’s online messaging, harvested data
concerning online engagement for over 230 million Facebook users, pooling it with other
information to develop a sprawling collection of psychographic profiles on potential voters
and gauge their receptiveness to various messaging strategies (Vaidhyanathan, 2018).
Heralding the rise of communications that, while reaching immense audiences, are
highly differentiated, it is estimated that, with the assistance of big data analytics,
Trump’s campaign disseminated over 6 million distinct online ads, with variations of
individual messages, at times, surpassing 200,000 (Singer and Brooking, 2018).
Big data also yields inferential and predictive knowledge, with computer models
unearthing correlations, extrapolating information about users, and forecasting reactions.
Here, digital enclosures are mined to identify regularities against which users are continuously
compared, outcomes that allow claims makers to anticipate content’s likely
resonance and develop flexible outreach strategies (Baym, 2013).12
Practices of dataveillance
are also recursive, as feedback in the form of engagement patterns is reflexively
monitored to elaborate correlations and deepen knowledge of users (Neuman et al.,
2014). Accordingly, digital communications double as iterative experiments where multiple
messages can be distributed simultaneously to survey reactions and refine techniques
of persuasion (Andrejevic, 2013).
In relation to panics, profiling user data liberates crusaders from ‘monolithic massappeal,
broadcast approach[es]’ to issue mobilization (Tufekci, 2014). Rather than
attracting support through unifying, ‘big tent’ issues, dataveillance facilitates agile
micro-targeted crusades. Able to cleave populations into demographic and affective
types, moral guardians can precisely ‘hail’subjectivities, allowing them to combine mass
transmission with individual connection and overcome what has traditionally been a
Hobson’s choice between maximal exposure and intimate resonance. Consequently,
moral contests promise to become exponentially more sophisticated, ensuring overwrought
discourse reaches, motivates and energizes its intended targets. Moreover, given
the expressive contours of panics, and the importance of emotions – anxiety, hostility,
even hysteria – as levers of action (Walby and Spencer, 2012), the mining, measurement
and classification of affective states allows crusaders to viscerally connect with audiences
and strengthen their messaging.
Discussion
As a distinct species of collective behaviour, moral panics represent contentious and
intensely affective campaigns to police the parameters of public knowledge and morality.
As such, they are necessarily dependent upon and constituted by claims-making, with
interested parties historically seeking to actuate alarm by influencing the imagery and
representations of the mainstream press, arrangements disrupted by recent upheavals in
media space. To illuminate the complex relationship between panics and the broader
Walsh	 851
socio-technical context in which they unfold, this article has surveyed the impact of digital
communications, presenting a taxonomy of social media’s effects on the issues, conditions
and practices that incite collective alarm. While displaying elite-challenging
potential, social media are ultimately Janus-faced and contradictory. Alongside providing
emergent sources of unease, they cultivate facilitating conditions and offer ideal
venues for constructing social problems. Specifically, by elevating agitational discourse
and promoting homophily, social media generate social friction and hostility. Moreover,
as instruments of panic production, new technologies reshape the identification and construction
of deviance, both permitting lay participation and allowing various parties to
manipulate public communications in ways that produce outsized, imperceptible and
highly efficient influence.
While gauging the precise effects of social media requires more rigorous scrutiny than
can be provided here, the available evidence indicates that, all things considered, they
inflate the incidence and severity of panics. On the one hand, various studies suggest
that, as architectures of amplification, digital platforms reduce transaction costs and
transform peripheral (as well as automated and artificial) voices into conspicuous claimants
(Vaidhyanathan, 2018).13
They also appear to enhance the spread of information
pollution, with scholarship revealing that, whether transmitted by algorithms or human
agents, ‘misinformation, polarizing, and conspiratorial content’ (Howard et al., 2018: 1)
not only ‘diffuse[s] significantly further, faster, [and] deeper’ on social media (Vosoughi
et al., 2018: 1146; Albright, 2017) but also, during the final days of the 2016 election,
represented the most popular informational content on Facebook, leading many to speculate
that it played a decisive role in Trump’s victory (Waisbord, 2018). Finally, evidence
surrounding the extent to which gross distortions, extremist views and readily falsifiable
conspiracies (such as the views that: climate change is a manufactured crisis, violent
crime is at historic highs, undocumented migrants are overwhelmingly violent criminals,
etc.) are being normalized as public idiom gives considerable cause for concern
(McIntyre, 2018; Scheufele and Krause, 2019).14
Beyond advancing understanding of the media–moral panic relationship, an important
task in its own right, by initiating dialogue between theoretical expectations and
empirical instances, the preceding analysis promotes conceptual refinement and
renewal. Specifically, accounting for social media’s effects on panic production illuminates
significant mutations surrounding the interactants, functions and communicative
patterns that define contemporary crusades. First, as many-to-many systems of communication,
social media promote novel patterns of participation, offering ordinary
persons a greater role, facilitating spontaneous outbursts driven by multitudes and
introducing automated, machine-led campaigns. Additionally, in enabling new techniques
of media manipulation, digital platforms contribute to the weaponization of
panics. While conventional wisdom suggests that panics represent domestic affairs,
oriented towards mobilizing support, acquiring power and status or manufacturing
consent, the case of Russia and information warfare suggests that normative conflict
may be exogenously engineered to provoke significant social and psychological disruption.
Finally, in place of uniform messages and mass appeal, the combination of
data-mining and behavioural profiling unleashes claims-making techniques that are
inhabited and hyper-targeted.
852	 International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(6)
Drawing attention to these features exposes significant transformations and bolsters
the versatility and explanatory capacity of Cohen’s paradigm. Thus, mirroring other
recent interventions (Falkof, 2018; Joosse, 2018; Wright, 2017), by accounting for emergent
social conditions, this article advances a nuanced, flexible framework rather than a
fixed, uniform model. Ultimately, exposing anomalous findings that push the limits of
existing perspectives extends the concept’s range of applicability, promoting a more
robust framework capable of accommodating pivotal shifts in media space and the social
relations they engender. Alongside laying the foundation for further empirical applications,
given the depth and rapidity of social change, such conceptual dexterity is an asset
rather than a liability (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2010; Jewkes, 2015).
Conclusion
As an account of reaction and social problems construction, moral panic theory has traditionally
emphasized the mass media’s role in sculpting collective knowledge, arbitrating
between the real and represented, and generating significant discrepancy between risk and
response. This article suggests that, while the legacy press continues to play a significant
role, with the ubiquity of digital platforms and technologies, the emergence and spread of
panics is being reconstituted. In particular, scholars can further refine and expand the
concept’s range and impact by engaging with social media’s diverse and far-reaching
effects on the contours of collective alarm. While it is admittedly premature to predict
what new attributes media systems will assume, and there is too much contingency to
suggest that future developments will follow an inexorable path, it is hoped that, by taking
technological change into account, the idea of moral panic will continue to influence
understandings of how fear and transgression are mobilized for varied purposes.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Notes
  1.	 In relation to Cohen’s work, McRobbie and Thornton’s (1995) critique continues to be cited
as a core ‘dimension of dispute’ (David et al., 2011; cf. Carrabine, 2008; Garland, 2008;
Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2010).
 2.	 For instance, Facebook’s 2.38 billion active users leave roughly 300,000 comments per
minute and share over 5 billion posts per day (Chandler and Fuchs, 2019; cf. Walsh and
O’Connor, 2019).
 3.	 In 2017, two-thirds of American adults obtained some of their news from social media
(Shearer and Gottfried, 2017), while, for British and North American youth, it represents
their primary news source (Wakefield, 2016).
  4.	 An exemplary case is Pekka-Eric Auvinen a Finnish shooter deemed the ‘YouTube gunman’
after using the video-sharing site to publicize his actions, espouse nihilistic views, and share
a final message immediately before killing eight people (Lindgren, 2011; Walsh, 2019b).
  5.	 One study of Facebook found the ‘click-through’ rate for socially divisive content exceeded
typical ads by tenfold (Ribeiro et al., 2019).
Walsh	 853
  6.	 In a striking example of online shaming and digitally mediated outrage, moral entrepreneurs
associated with anti-paedophile activism in Canada, the UK, and Russia have all employed
digital platforms to investigate, identify, expose and censure suspected sex offenders (FavarelGarrigues,
2019; Trottier, 2017).
 7.	 Citing Donald Trump’s rise as a charismatic political maverick, Joosse (2018) argues that
non-traditional media are ideally suited for producing and reiterating simplistic and highly
resonant moral categories, outcomes that can endow otherwise peripheral parties with significant
power and influence.
 8.	 While a full discussion exceeds the scope of this article, the alt-right encompasses an illdefined
amalgam of actors (white nationalists, men’s rights activists, palaeo-conservatives,
nativists, etc.) united by opposition to ‘identity politics’, multiculturalism, and perceived
‘political correctness’ (Hawley, 2017; Nagle, 2017).
 9.	 For instance, videos of Chinese citizens eating bats, rodents, snakes and other ‘dirty’ or
‘exotic’ wildlife were quickly posted and widely distributed across various social networking
sites (Palmer, 2020).
10.	 Surveys from the USA reveal one-quarter of respondents have knowingly shared misinformation
on social media (Barthel et al., 2016).
11.	 Russian operatives also contributed to such efforts, distributing content and even organizing
protests through fake Twitter and Facebook accounts (Singer and Brooking, 2018).
12.	 Research reveals, for instance, that various attributes – sexuality, religiosity, education, etc.
– can be reliably predicted from patterns involving the single data point, Facebook ‘likes’
(Markovikj et al., 2013).
13.	 For example, during the 2016 election, content from just six Russian-backed Facebook
accounts garnered 340 million shares and nearly 20 million interactions on the platform
(Matsakis, 2018). Additionally, whether deployed by foreign agents or domestic extremists,
bots produced one-third of posts concerning the 2016 Brexit vote, despite representing just
1% of active Twitter accounts (Narayanan et al., 2017).
14.	 For instance, over two-thirds of Americans claim that fake news has left them disoriented
and confused about basic facts (Barthel et al., 2016), while another survey revealed 75% of
Americans familiar with a fake news headline thought it was accurate (Roozenbeek and Van
der Linden, 2019).
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Author biography
James P Walsh is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Ontario Institute of
Technology. In addition to moral panics, his research focuses on crime and media; surveillance;
and border security and migration policing.