the.com/moral panic

means A sudden, widespread wave of public fear that some group, trend, or behavior is a dire threat to social order — usually wildly disproportionate to the actual danger.

from The phrase was popularized by sociologist Stanley Cohen in his 1972 study 'Folk Devils and Moral Panics,' which examined British media hysteria over 1960s youth subcultures (the mods and rockers). Cohen traced how a minor seaside scuffle got amplified by press coverage into a full-blown narrative of societal breakdown, with the youths cast as 'folk devils.' The term stuck because the pattern kept recurring — comic books, video games, Satanic cults, whatever the current year's scapegoat — and sociologists needed a name for society's recurring habit of mistaking a symptom for a disease.