Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The aim of the class was to better understand the concept of moral panics, which are societal epidemics of disproportionate fear ...

Internet debates have a way of flattening important issues into little more than hashtags. Serious studies of propaganda and misinformation have been undermined by politicians who call any ...

The cameras were working as intended, held under accountable local purview. Yet the city chose to dismantle a functional ...

“Moral panics” are popular explanations that spread at times of change and uncertainty, particularly when the order of things seems to be threatened and the privileged groups start getting worried ...

American actress Vera Miles stars as Lila Crane in the horror classic 'Psycho', directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images) Between 2006 and 2009 a Moral Panic situation ...

A lust for alcoholic beverages and a taste for illicit drugs. Liberated women in search of sexual pleasure and the menace of racial integration. A nation undermined by crypto-communists and children ...

Moral panics also trigger responses that lack sufficient evidence — a process, wrote future Nobel laureate George Stigler, that tends to result in rules that are “capricious and arbitrary in high ...

Don’t look now, but we seem to have a moral panic on our hands. The term moral panic, at least as a social science concept, is relatively modern. It was coined by Stanley Cohen in the 1972 book “Folk ...

South Australia last week began consultations on a proposed social media ban for children under the age of 14. The federal government quickly announced its intention to follow suit with a national ...

The day before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, I was teaching a college class on science, religion and magic. Our class was comparing the Salem witch trials of the 1690s with the McCarthy hearings of ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) The aim of the class was to better understand the concept of moral panics, which are ...