Thread by @alicetiara

I have SOMETHING TO SAY about this batshit crazy story. Basically: the media LOVES a teen technopanic.
The PR firm easily exploited a hundred-year old moral panic over kids and tech. Here's why.

https://twitter.com/WillOremus/status/1509144766855983106

New tech? Kind of scary to adults! New tech that KIDS USE that they DON'T UNDERSTAND? *terrifying*

This is cyclical. In the 1830s people freaked out b/c boys were reading "penny dreadfuls" - trashy sensationalist serials. The press fretted that working class kids would read this stuff and then turn to violence.

Fast forward 100 years and a moral panic erupts over comic books causing "juvenile delinquency," includingcongressional hearings, parents burning comics, accusations that Batman & Robin were gay lovers, the usual. The comic book industry, panicked, instituted the Comics Code.

Comic books & trashy serials aren't what we think of today as "new media," but they were at the time. When I was a kid in 80s Britain, the media freaked about kids watching "video nasties"-VHS rentals of gory, often foreign, horror films bfi.org.uk/sight-and-soun…

Then enter the internet. The 1995 cyberporn panic that resulted in both the DMCA *and* section 230 painted the *mostly textual* internet as a "kitchen sink of depravity" and was fueled by mainstream journalists and pearl-clutching politicians

I wrote about "technopanics" in 2005, frustrated with the MySpace moral panic over so-called "online predators." The idea that MySpace was extremely dangerous was mostly unfounded, and the "online predators" panic was overblown and based on a handful of sensationalized cases.

Technopanics 1) focus on new media 2) they pathologize young people's use of new media 3) the cultural anxiety manifests itself in trying to control young people [cached version: the journal website is down: scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cach…]

Journalists are ABSOLUTELY responsible for magnifying and amplifying technopanics. It's catnip to audiences, who apparently love fretting about children, worrying about modernity, and wringing their hands about how it's all going to hell

So I'm not even slightly surprised that this TikTok devious licks/slap a teacher day nonsense was totally fake. Moral panics are *always* disproportionate. It's always linked to middle-aged people worrying about kids being more familiar with tech than they are.

Yes, it was extraordinarily shady of Facebook to do this, but it wouldn't have worked if a lot of very credulous journalists and parents groups hadn't fallen for it. Tech use is complicated and nuanced, and the best journalists understand that.