What Is a Moral Panic?
Sometimes a social problem seems to become much larger than the events that originally brought it to public attention. Newspapers, television programmes, politicians, campaigners and, increasingly, social media users begin discussing the same apparent threat. Particular people or groups come to symbolise the problem, demands are made for something to be done, and behaviour that previously attracted relatively little attention begins to be interpreted as evidence of a much wider crisis.
Sociologists describe some of these episodes as moral panics. The term is often used casually to mean that people are worrying too much, but sociologically it means something more specific. A moral panic is not simply a false fear, nor does it require the underlying problem to be imaginary. Crime, violence, drug use or other behaviours at the centre of a moral panic may be entirely real. What interests sociologists is the social reaction surrounding them: how a problem is defined, how its seriousness is represented, who becomes blamed for it, whose voices are treated as authoritative, and what forms of social control follow.
The concept is most closely associated with Stanley Cohen’s study of Mods and Rockers in Britain during the 1960s. More than half a century later, the media environment has changed almost beyond recognition, yet the questions Cohen asked remain remarkably familiar. Why do some problems suddenly become symbols of everything thought to be wrong with society? Why are particular groups turned into threats, and why do some controversies leave behind laws and attitudes long after the original events have faded?
Cohen, the Mods and Rockers, and the creation of folk devils
Stanley Cohen developed his account of moral panic through research into reactions to clashes between Mods and Rockers, two youth subcultures associated with different fashions, music and lifestyles. His research was published in Folk Devils and Moral Panics in 1972.
The events that particularly interested Cohen began around English seaside resorts during holiday weekends in 1964. Groups of young people gathered in places such as Clacton, Margate and Brighton, and some fighting, vandalism and disorder occurred. Cohen did not argue that journalists simply invented these disturbances. Instead, he became interested in the gap between what happened and what those events subsequently came to represent.
Media reporting helped transform relatively contained incidents into evidence of an apparent youth crisis. Mods and Rockers were presented not simply as young people involved in disorder but as representatives of something more troubling: rebellious youth, declining standards and a weakening of social order. Repeated photographs, dramatic headlines and predictions of future trouble helped establish a recognisable story through which later incidents could be interpreted.
Cohen called groups that acquire this symbolic role folk devils. A folk devil becomes a visible embodiment of a wider social problem, allowing complicated anxieties to be concentrated upon something recognisable. Instead of worrying vaguely about changing youth culture, family relationships or authority, concern can be attached to a group whose appearance and behaviour seem to represent those changes.
This connects closely with deviance. As explored in What Makes Something Deviant?, behaviour does not become deviant purely because of some quality contained within the act itself. Social reactions and judgements matter too. Moral panic theory examines what can happen when that process becomes amplified, moving from particular acts to the construction of an entire group or phenomenon as a threat.
For Cohen, then, the important story was not simply what the Mods and Rockers did. It was what happened around them as journalists, police, courts, politicians and members of the public interpreted their behaviour and responded to it.
How a moral panic develops
Cohen’s work is sometimes reduced to a simple sequence in which an event occurs, the media exaggerate it and the public panics. His argument was more interesting than that because he described a process of social reaction in which media representation, public concern and social control could reinforce one another.
An event may attract attention because it connects with an existing concern. Reporting then simplifies what happened, perhaps by emphasising particular characteristics, repeatedly using striking images or connecting separate incidents into a single apparent pattern. Once a recognisable threat has been established, later events can be interpreted through the same framework and become further evidence of a growing problem.
Authorities may then respond more intensely. Police devote greater attention to the behaviour, courts impose stronger sanctions, politicians demand action and experts are asked to explain what is going wrong. Greater surveillance can reveal additional incidents, which generate further reporting and appear to confirm the original concern.
This process is often described as deviancy amplification. Social control does not merely respond to an independently existing amount of deviance. The response itself can alter how much behaviour is noticed, recorded and sometimes produced.
If several incidents involving teenagers in a town centre receive extensive publicity, for example, increased policing may mean that behaviour previously ignored is now challenged and officially recorded. Those additional incidents can then be cited as proof that youth disorder is increasing. A genuine problem may have existed at the beginning, but the reaction becomes part of the process through which its scale and meaning develop.
Folk devils, moral entrepreneurs and power
Moral panics raise questions about power because not everybody has an equal ability to define something as a social problem. Politicians, police representatives, journalists, campaign organisations and professional experts often have much greater access to public platforms than the people whose behaviour is being discussed.
The concept of the moral entrepreneur, associated especially with Howard Becker’s work on deviance, is useful here. Moral entrepreneurs seek to establish or strengthen rules because they believe certain behaviour should be controlled. They may sincerely believe that they are protecting society from harm. Sociology is interested less in whether their motives are genuine than in how some definitions of a problem acquire authority while others do not.
During a moral panic, complex social changes can therefore become organised around simpler oppositions: respectable society against threatening outsiders, responsibility against disorder, normality against deviance. The folk devil provides a recognisable face for the problem, while moral entrepreneurs help define what the problem means and what should be done about it.
From Cohen to Policing the Crisis
The concept developed significantly during the 1970s through Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts’ Policing the Crisis (1978). Their analysis of the British concern about “mugging” pushed moral panic theory more explicitly towards questions of race, economic crisis and state power.
Hall and his colleagues argued that the panic around mugging could not be understood merely by comparing newspaper reporting with crime statistics. Economic difficulties, political conflict and anxieties about social order became connected to crime, while the figure of the mugger became racialised through its association with young Black men.
This broadened Cohen’s approach. Moral panics did not simply exaggerate isolated acts of deviance; they could become ways through which societies interpreted deeper crises. A group could become a convincing folk devil because existing anxieties about social change had already created the conditions in which that representation made sense.
The important question therefore became not simply why the media exaggerated a problem, but why this problem involving this group became so powerful at this historical moment. That remains central to contemporary moral panic analysis.
How do we know when something really is a moral panic?
The phrase “moral panic” has escaped sociology and entered everyday language, where it can easily become a dismissive label for any public concern someone believes is exaggerated.
Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda (1994) tried to make the concept more systematic by identifying five common characteristics: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality and volatility. Concern rises around a behaviour or group, hostility develops towards those held responsible, and a degree of agreement emerges that the threat is serious. The reaction is regarded as disproportionate to the available evidence and may rise and fall rapidly.
The difficult element is disproportionality, because describing a reaction as disproportionate requires some judgement about how much concern would have been justified. That may be relatively straightforward when factual claims are demonstrably wrong, but much harder when evidence is incomplete or the possible consequences are serious.
David Garland (2008) therefore cautions against treating moral panic simply as a sophisticated way of saying that other people’s concerns are foolish. Its analytical value lies in examining how threats are constructed, amplified and acted upon.
The distinction becomes particularly important when controversies involve genuine problems.
Video games, Hot Coffee and recurring anxieties about new media
Video games provide a useful example because they have repeatedly attracted debates about violence, sexuality, childhood and the possible effects of new media. Controversies surrounding games such as Mortal Kombat and later the Grand Theft Auto series formed part of wider arguments about whether interactive media presented risks different from films, television or other cultural products.
One of the clearest examples came in 2005 with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. A modification known as Hot Coffee enabled players to access a sexual mini-game that had been created during development and remained on retail copies of the game, although it was disabled during ordinary play. The controversy resulted in the game’s US age rating being changed temporarily, copies being withdrawn by retailers and regulatory scrutiny over whether the content had been properly disclosed.
There was therefore a genuine issue at the centre of the controversy. The content existed and its presence raised legitimate questions about age classification. Yet Hot Coffee also became entangled with a much broader debate about whether video games were exposing young people to inappropriate material or contributing to violence and sexualised behaviour. The specific regulatory problem and the wider moral argument were connected, but they were not identical.
More than twenty years later, a very different controversy emerged around EA Sports FC 27. During its early-access period in 2026, players circulated footage of a graphical error that caused some female characters to appear in underwear rather than their intended clothing during parts of the game. EA described the problem as an isolated outfit-display issue and said it would be corrected.
Technically, the two incidents were very different. Hot Coffee involved deliberately created content that had been disabled but remained accessible, whereas the FC 27 problem was presented as a rendering fault. Their sociological connection lies in the way both entered an existing debate about games, sexuality, age-appropriate content and the responsibilities of entertainment companies.
Neither incident becomes a moral panic merely because people objected. A moral panic analysis asks what happens as a specific problem travels through wider public discussion. Does attention remain focused on the particular technical or regulatory issue, or does it become evidence for a much larger claim about video games, young people or declining moral standards?
The comparison also helps demonstrate how the media environment has changed. Hot Coffee was uncovered through digital participation, but much of its wider amplification still ran through traditional news organisations, politicians, regulators and retailers. By the time of the FC 27 incident, players themselves could capture and circulate footage to large audiences before conventional news organisations became involved.
That shift has important consequences for Cohen’s model.
From mass media to social media
Cohen wrote in a world dominated by mass media. A relatively small number of newspapers and broadcasters exercised enormous influence over which events became nationally visible and how those events were framed. People identified as folk devils had few opportunities to present their own account directly to a mass audience, while most members of the public remained primarily consumers rather than producers of media.
By the 1990s, Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton (1995) were already arguing that this model needed reconsideration. They described increasingly multi-mediated social worlds in which audiences were fragmented and groups labelled as deviant could use alternative media to challenge dominant representations. The internet and social media have transformed that process much further.
Yet the disappearance of traditional gatekeeping does not mean that media power has disappeared. Some of it has shifted towards algorithmic systems that determine which pieces of content receive visibility. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram do not simply present everything chronologically. Ranking and recommendation systems decide what users are most likely to see partly by predicting which material will attract their attention and interaction.
That becomes sociologically important because engagement is not emotionally neutral. Content that provokes anger, fear, moral condemnation or intense disagreement can attract comments, reactions and shares. Somebody sharing a post because they think it is appalling is still sharing it, while an argument involving hundreds of hostile comments is still generating attention.
The platform does not have to understand the moral meaning of the controversy for the controversy to become part of the mechanism producing visibility. Research on online behaviour has shown that social feedback can reinforce expressions of moral outrage, while signs that material is widely shared can themselves increase perceptions that a moral threat is serious.
This creates the possibility of a feedback loop. Outrage produces engagement, engagement increases visibility, visibility brings the issue to new audiences, and those audiences generate further reactions.
Contemporary moral panic is therefore much less linear than the process Cohen observed. A controversy might begin with a Reddit post, TikTok video or Facebook post, be amplified by users, picked up by an influencer, reported by a news organisation, commented upon by politicians and then return to social media carrying the additional authority of mainstream coverage.
The direction of influence is no longer simply media to public. It can move repeatedly between users, algorithms, influencers, journalists, authorities and back again.
This does not mean that Facebook, Instagram or other platforms deliberately decide to manufacture moral panics. The process is more indirect. Systems designed to predict relevance and encourage engagement can nevertheless create conditions in which provocative material performs well precisely because people find it difficult not to react to it.
There is also an important difference between what people enjoy and what they engage with. A user may comment because something makes them angry, share it in order to condemn it, or repeatedly return because they are arguing with somebody. From the perspective of an engagement signal, however, all of these behaviours demonstrate attention.
This changes the mechanisms Cohen described. Newspaper editors in the 1960s made recognisable editorial decisions about which photographs of Mods and Rockers to print and which headlines to place above them. Contemporary amplification can emerge from the interaction between millions of users and automated systems, with no single person necessarily deciding that a controversy should dominate public attention.
The machinery has changed, but Cohen’s underlying insight remains recognisable: social reaction can enlarge an event and transform what that event comes to mean.
Folk devils in a fragmented media world
The contemporary media environment also complicates the idea of a single folk devil. Groups represented as threatening can now answer back, produce their own media and mobilise supporters, while individuals outside traditional institutions can themselves become influential participants in defining a controversy.
At the same time, digital visibility can make demonisation extraordinarily intense. Someone previously known only within a small community can suddenly become a symbol in an international argument, with photographs or fragments of video circulating among people who know almost nothing about the original circumstances.
Different communities may also construct opposing folk devils around the same event. One group may regard protesters as the threat while another focuses on the behaviour of authorities. One community may interpret a social change as evidence of declining standards while another regards opposition to that change as the greater danger.
Contemporary moral panics may therefore lack the relatively unified public consensus associated with Cohen’s mass-media world. The concept still has value, but applying it now requires attention to competing narratives as well as dominant ones.
Why moral panics still matter
Cohen’s Mods and Rockers belong to a social and media world that now seems distant, but the enduring importance of his work lies in the fact that it was never really just about young people fighting at seaside resorts. It was about how societies construct and respond to threats.
Moral panic theory helps us understand how a limited event can acquire a much wider social meaning, how particular people can become symbols of disorder, and how media representation, public anxiety and institutional responses can reinforce one another. Later writers have shown that these processes also need to be understood through race, class, political power and economic change, while digital media have made the routes through which amplification occurs much more fragmented and participatory.
Today’s moral panics may therefore be faster, less centralised and more contested. Folk devils can answer back, audiences can become publishers, algorithms can amplify controversy, and different social groups can construct competing versions of the same threat. None of this removes the basic sociological problem Cohen identified.
When a person, group, behaviour or cultural product suddenly comes to represent a threat far larger than itself, sociology asks us not merely whether the original concern was real. It asks how that concern acquired a wider meaning, who helped define it, why it resonated at that particular moment, and what society became willing to do in response.
That is what makes a moral panic sociologically interesting. It can tell us something about the behaviour being condemned, but it may tell us even more about the society doing the condemning.
References
- Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. Free Press.
- Cohen, S. (1972). Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the Mods and Rockers. MacGibbon & Kee.
- Garland, D. (2008). On the concept of moral panic. Crime, Media, Culture, 4(1), 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659007087270
- Goode, E., & Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994). Moral panics: Culture, politics, and social construction. Annual Review of Sociology, 20, 149–171. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.20.080194.001053
- Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state, and law and order. Macmillan.
- McRobbie, A., & Thornton, S. L. (1995). Rethinking 'moral panic' for multi-mediated social worlds. The British Journal of Sociology, 46(4), 559–574. https://doi.org/10.2307/591571
- Walsh, J. P. (2020). Social media and moral panics: Assessing the effects of technological change on societal reaction. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 23(6), 840–859. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920912257
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