Cases where a populace has panicked

[Lumpy]

@kunilou

We can also include market panics. Even if we allow that some of them involved computer program trading that didn’t know when to stop, there were no computers in October 1929.

The October crash wasn’t as much a panic as it was the inevitable popping of a bubble.

Before the Civil Rights era, basically any report of a black male attacking a white woman quickly escalated into lynchings or race riots.

[Chronos]

[Moderating]
How did I only just now notice that this is in GQ?

Moving to IMHO.

[TSBG]

@Lord_Feldon

Is it really a panic when someone sees that there’s going to be inclement weather on Wednesday, and says “eh, I’d rather go on Tuesday”? Bread, milk, and eggs are relatively fresh, so they’ll run out first when an unusually high number people are shopping. They’re buying canned goods and frozen food and cereal too, it’s just that the store usually has more than one day of those things on hand.

Agreed. I have posted this in other contexts, but in Buffalo NY, where I grew up, we would sometimes have advance warning of blizzards, or the leading edge of the storm would land when there was still time and ability to get to the store. My mother would stock up on supplies and we’d eat better than usual for a week, because there wasn’t much else to do. Only three broadcast networks plus PBS and a UHF independent. I re-read so many books then. Pasta with bay scallops and other delights were great breaks from the monotony.

[Baker]

Even the Canadians got scared and interned people during both WWI and WWII.

[Mangetout]

@dorvann

I am curious though. If nothing was fixed, was the Y2K crisis really serious enough that people would have to hoard a year supply of food and thousands of round of ammo? Because some people were doing that. How serious a problem was it actually? It could still warrant a panic if they were was overreacting to a real problem.

If nothing had been fixed, it would have been disruptive, but probably not civilisation-ending. Anything that was date-driven and worked on a 2 digit year segment could have been affected - and by ‘affected’, that’s a spectrum of possibilities ranging from mild or annoying misbehaviour, right through to total system failure.

Some older database standards literally would have stopped working if unpatched - so any business relying on such a system could have gone bust (for many businesses, it only takes a week or two of complete failure to trade, and they’re done for

[Peter_Morris]

The Y2K bug was a serious problem. The trouble is that some people misunderstand what it meant. They think it was all about computers failing at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999. It never was like that.

Think of a program written in 1965 to keep track of 25-year mortgages. Dates are rerpresented in 2 digits, to find the end year add 25 to the start year.

mortgage start in '65, end in '90 works fine
mortgage start in '66, end in '91 works fine
mortgage start in '67, end in '92 works fine
…
mortgage start in '74, end in '99 works fine
mortgage start in '75, end in '100 oops, the program stops working. It can’t fit 100 into 2 digits. Unexpected errors follow.

That is the millennium bug. This caused many problems for years. They became more common as the millennium approached. Experts hired to identify potential problems before they happened was entirely legitimate.

[SciFiSam]

Not exactly a whole populace, but in December 2018 there was a supposed drone sighting at Gatwick Airport near London, flights were grounded and it was HUGE in the news. The army were sent in.

And it increasingly looks like there never was a drone at all (they never found a drone or any footage of one on site with thousands of cameras). Not that that helped a couple who were arrested for no reason at all and hounded by the press.

Gatwick drone 'may never have existed' as couple are released without charge

There was a drone at Heathrow a month or so later and people took it less seriously because of the previous scare.

@griffin1977

If the OP is specifically asking for times governments were proven right in their decision to keep information secret (or wrong in their decision not to). The British government keeping secret how low food supplies had got during the Battle of the Atlantic has to be a contender.

Obviously you never going to prove what would have happened the alternative reality where the British government were honest about the fact there wasn’t any food left (and of course there are revisionist who say they were never that close to running out of food). But the balance evidence to me is there would have been a lot of panic and overwhelming demand to sue for peace if the government had been honest with the public.

There was an event in WWII in London called the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster. 173 were killed including 62 children, because there were tests of new guns in Victoria Park - which is not even that near the tube so they must have been LOUD - and they panicked as they entered the station and one woman fell down, followed by lots more falling behind her, and the rest dying in the crush.

This was kept secret so as not to scare people from using the tube as a safe shelter. As horrible as that is, it probably was sensible and did save lives. The official report citing safety concerns was repressed but the changes it recommended (like handrails and opening multiple entrances and having someone to guide people in and out) were still put in, including at Bethnal Green. Those changes had been requested before the disaster and would quite likely have prevented it. I guess covering those failures up is sort of justified in the wartime situation.

It was kept secret for 34 years though, long after the war - perhaps the govt wanted to make sure people would use the tube shelters in case of a nuclear attack. But it meant that the survivors and the bereaved were literally banned from talking about it and the victims were officially blamed, in parliament, for their own deaths, which is really not justifiable.

Here’s one of the links: Bethnal Green Tube Disaster: 'I tried to black it out' - BBC News
And another: http://stairwaytoheavenmemorial.org/