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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...

Whenever a new technology comes along that creates a revolutionarily new means of communication, the young glom onto it and their elders, or a highly vocal group of them, believe it is leading to the ...

Moral panics are something. I started looking into them because of this nonsense about woke-ified M&Ms, and was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of imminent threats to our society, our children ...

When the Food & Drug Administration put out a memo last month warning readers not to marinate chicken in NyQuil cold and flu medicine, it had the opposite effect as intended — instead of keeping ...

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 ...

(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 ...