Googling in Fear: Measuring Moral Panic Using Internet Searches Before and After Obama’s 2008 Election

ABSTRACT

The rhetoric, rumor, and hostility that surrounded the election of Barack Obama in 2008 appeared to correspond with the notion of a “moral panic.” However, systematically measuring phenomena like moral panics, which are volatile and dispersed in nature, can be difficult. This paper utilizes Google search data combined with other sources to examine the reaction to the candidacy and initial election of Obama. Given the nature of this particular panic, we hypothesize that panic-induced searches will be greater in states with a larger presence of Evangelical Protestants and consumption of conservative media outlets. Results from a series of generalized least squares time-series and two-stage regression models demonstrate that searches related to “socialism” and the “Antichrist” grew significantly around Obama’s election, indicating Obama’s “folk devil” status and a growing moral panic. Additionally, the intensity of the panic appears to be moderated by religious cultures and media consumption. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.

Notes

¹ According to the Bible’s end-times Book of Revelation, the Antichrist is the devil in human form, arriving on Earth to set in motion the apocalypse known as “Rapture” or Judgment Day.

² The Alternative Right, also known as the Alt-Right, is term coined in 2010 by white supremacist Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute, used to describe those “on the extreme right who reject mainstream conservativism in favor of forms of conservativism that embrace implicit or explicit racism or white supremacy” (Anti-Defamation League 2017).

³ While Goode and Ben-Yehuda focused on groups as the cause of moral panics, it is also possible for an individual, particularly a very public and potentially powerful one, to be made the target of a moral panic as the “folk devil” (Cohen 1972).

⁴ While there has been controversy surrounding the poll, for this article’s purpose the findings sufficiently indicate that there is more than just an extremist response to the Obama presidency in the United States (Avlon 2010).

⁵ By including an “and” between terms one can make the data represent the frequency of searches that included both terms. The user can specify that the results represent a particular time period ranging from 2004 to the present.

⁶ Searches on Google represented 65.4% of all searches in October of 2009 (Comscore 2009).

⁷ Because of the larger time period and common search term, there are no zero search scores for this measure as all of the states reached the minimum search volume threshold for “FOX news”.

⁸ For the Heckman models this is done by adding using Stata’s vce(cluster) option. For the GLS time series models this is done using the xtset option and specifying states as the group variable.

⁹ For example, the four highest states for Evangelical adherence are Arkansas (43%), Oklahoma (41%), Alabama (40%), and Mississippi (39%).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher P. Scheitle

CHRISTOPHER P. SCHEITLE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University. Broadly speaking, his research is interested in the social dynamics of religion in the United States. He has published over fifty articles and three books. His most recent book, co-authored with Elaine Howard Ecklund, is Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think (Oxford, 2017).

Richard K. Moule

RICHARD K. MOULE Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida. He earned his PhD in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Arizona State University. His research interests include criminological theory and the correlates and consequences of technology adoption and use for individuals and groups.

Bryanna H. Fox

BRYANNA H. FOX is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Courtesy Professor in the Department of Mental Health, Law, and Policy at the University of South Florida. Dr. Fox earned her PhD in psychological criminology from the University of Cambridge in England. She is a former FBI Special Agent, and recipient of the 2013 Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award from the International Association of Chiefs of Police for her experimental evaluation of the impact of offender profiles on law enforcement investigations. Her main research interests include forensic psychology, the identification of psychological and developmental risk factors for criminal behavior, and development of evidence-based tools for law enforcement.