Moral panics have regularly erupted in society, but they appear almost daily on social media. We propose that social media helps fuel moral panics by combining perceived societal threats with a powerful signal of social amplification-virality. Eight studies with multiple methods test a social amplification model of moral panics in which virality amplifies perceptions of threats posed by deviant behavior and ideas, prompting moral outrage expression. Three naturalistic studies of Twitter (N = 237,230) reveal that virality predicts moral outrage in response to tweets about controversial issues, even when controlling for specific tweet content. Five experiments (N = 1,499) reveal the causal impact of virality on outrage expression and suggest that feelings of danger mediate this effect. This work connects classic ideas about moral panics with ongoing research on social media and provides a perspective on the nature of moral outrage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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社交媒体上的道德恐慌是由病毒式传播的信号助长的。


道德恐慌经常在社会上爆发，但它们几乎每天都出现在社交媒体上。我们提出，社交媒体通过将感知到的社会威胁与社会放大病毒式传播的强大信号相结合，帮助助长道德恐慌。八项研究采用多种方法测试了道德恐慌的社会放大模型，其中病毒式传播放大了对越轨行为和思想构成威胁的看法，从而引发道德愤怒的表达。对 Twitter 的三项自然主义研究 （N = 237,230） 表明，病毒式传播可以预测对有关有争议问题的推文的道德愤怒，即使在控制特定的推文内容时也是如此。五个实验 （N = 1,499） 揭示了病毒式传播对愤怒表达的因果影响，并表明危险感介导了这种影响。这项工作将关于道德恐慌的经典观点与正在进行的社交媒体研究联系起来，并提供了关于道德愤怒本质的观点。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 （c） 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。