Looking through the thread on social media lockdowns led me to wonder if the general population is that easily panicked. Endless movies have shown the government keeping some terrible news (Killer asteroids, imminent invasions, etc) from the people in order to preserve peace.
To me, withholding information pisses me off more than anything and I’d resent the government more for doing so. Are people that easily led to stampede like nervous cattle at the first whiff of trouble? I’d like to believe not, but what instances IRL have proven this to be a prudent course of action?
Look up ‘what’s app murders’ in India. (Sorry, I have shit luck making links. But this is easy to find!)
Oh, it’s also happening in South America, using the same app.
In these countries, for many, it may be the only social media they use.
More shameful, the app makers/owners refuse to reveal the initiator to law enforcement, so these nations can’t act against the perpetrators. (They do however cooperate, when pressed, with western law enforcement.)
Americans went absolutely nuts after Pearl Harbor. Everything that you’d think was only possible in today’s social media world happened then.
Rumors flew up and down the west coast. The government was forced to test and issue official denials against widespread rumors that Japanese farmers in California were poisoning their vegetables. Another test went out because of rumors Japanese saboteurs were adding glass to canned goods. Farther east reports of sabotage by Germans and Italians flooded civilian defense officials. Mayor Kelly of Chicago expected the water supply to be poisoned. Vigilante squads popped up across the country. Christmas was a time of fear. “The pagan enemy will not respect our most important religious festival,” warned one newspaper. A cone-shaped Christmas tree light manufactured in Asia was really a time bomb, said another.
Those are all examples just from two pages in The Darkest Year: The American Home Front 1941-1942, by William K. Klingaman. I’m up to page 140 and the entire book thus far is one endless report of panic and suspicion and fury without any good immediate target. From today’s perspective, the idea that Japanese bombers would fly over the Midwest is utterly ludicrous. But that’s presentism. At the time they knew nothing about enemy capabilities and so feared every possibility they could imagine. Since you can’t protect against everything at once, especially imaginary things, they lashed out futilely at innocents and made their own and everybody else’s lives miserable.
Americans also did this during World War I and the Cold War and after 9/11. I’m sure similar stories can told be about every other country throughout history. Populations will surely, absolutely, inevitably panic. Whether that’s an excuse to withhold bad news is a different question and depends entirely on the particular circumstances, though. No general answer is possible.
I guess Exapno Mapcase maybe had a different interpretation of public panic than I did after reading the OP. If there is a killer asteroid or imminent alien invasion, I would expect PANIC. Ya know, widespread riots and lawlessness, regular folks hunkered down in their houses gripping their firearms and crying, martial law declared. I am not aware of that happening in US history.
Someone is bound to bring up the War of the Worlds Broadcast, with Orson Welles. Certainly there was some over-reaction, but the rumors of widespread panic are apparently unfounded.
*The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast.
How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted.*
Good point. I should have made that more clear. I only mentioned “US” because I am not confident enough in my understanding of world history to make a comment on it.
Hundreds of folks thought the world would end. Millions of dollars were spent on renovating/checking computer equipment to ensure it wouldn’t stop working.
Based on your description, I’d say no, it does not qualify. Every day you can probably find hundreds of folks who think the world is about to end. And I suspect that it was more like billions of dollars spent to fix the Y2K bug, and that was not a panic; it was a necessary effort.
OK, this is interesting. Before I clicked on your link I thought you were jokingly referring to the 2011 movie Battle: Los Angeles. And now, upon reading my own link, I discovered that that movie was in fact based on that historical incident. :eek:
Computer programs wouldn’t have stopped working, but they wouldn’t have worked accurately. Code relying on two digit years had to be updated. It wasn’t a panic. It was plain business sense.
My parents were visiting friends just a few miles from the Martians’ landing site. My mom said they just looked out the window, saw nothing unusual, and went back to playing cards.
Some good examples so far, even the Whatsapp although that’s almost the opposite of what I had in mind. Rumour mills have been an issue since one person could talk to another about a third and I get the mechanisms of how FUD (Fear, uncertainty, and Doubt) spreads in that way due to a lack of clear info. What I’m trying to figure out is whether government warnings have indeed caused mass panic (Not propaganda but clear, factual warnings about something like a tsunami warning for example.) There are lots of examples of why a body politic decides to keep the people in the dark but is that based on any evidence that telling them would cause more of a problem than keeping quiet or is it solely on human factors like pride, fear of discredit, etc.?
I really hate it when people use Y2K as an example of “panic over nothing”. Very little went wrong precisely because millions of dollars and huge amounts of time were spent on fixing the problem. :smack:
The potential is there. Twitter. Create a fake emergency, put up a bunch of fake “official looking” shit telling people what they should do.
The Vegas strip was a bit of a cluster the night of the shooting because of false reports, etc on Twitter. A lot of it was mitigated by security procedures of the hotels.
It’s not that that didn’t happen before social media, it just happens faster.
One self-appointed civilian guardian of the peace fired a rifle into a house because he saw flashes of light and thought the occupant was signaling the Enemy (it was a housewife testing a lamp. Fortunately he missed her).
It wasn’t just America. England had a ton of bogus “spy” sightings and rumors were rampant (including that Nazis were dressed up as nuns). One unfortunate farmer was hauled in by the S.I.S. and grilled, after it was reported that he had mown a field to leave an arrow of wheat pointing in the direction of an R.A.F. base three miles away (to alert the Luftwaffe, doncha know). He was released after it was decided that he had just gotten bored with the usual wheat harvest and had no idea a base was nearby.
These examples aren’t exactly “panic”, but there sure were a lot of loose cannons among civilians (and military as well) during WWII.
What about the false missile alerts in Hawaii in 2018? Many reports described the 38 minutes between the “incoming” and “oops” alerts as being a panic. It was a panic in that it induced fear and anxiety, and many people behaved in ways which were inappropriate, even if the missiles had turned out to be real. For example, parents went to pick kids up from school, even though it would probably have been safer for the parents to shelter where they were, and let the kids shelter in school, than to have them all stuck on the roads.
As far as I know, it did not result in rioting, looting, or widespread lawlessness.