Russian Propaganda and Moral panic: the Implications for North America

Abstract

This presentation aims to explore Russian propaganda and how it relates to Stanley Cohen's idea of Moral panic by examining the conspiracy theories of Biolabs in Ukraine. This will be done by exploring the Five Stages of a Moral Panic and contrasting them to tweets by well- known Twitter users. The goal of this presentation is to show how Russian propaganda is causing a moral panic in the united states and how in turn, that can cause a lack of institutional trust in the government. A secondary goal of this presentation is to both show the scope of Russian propaganda on Social Media sites and link propaganda to popular conspiracy theories such as Q-anon and Covid Conspiracies.

Department: Sociology 

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Michael Gulayets