The Panics That Came and Went

The column that isn't there

Every entry in the register above is a charge that was not carried. That's how they were chosen, so a column marking each one wrong would be a tautology with a tone attached, and it would also be the lazier of the two available mistakes.

The column worth reading is the last one. When the argument stopped, what was still standing?

Six of these left something behind: an industry code, a statute, a regulator's policy, or in one case a tested practice. The other nine left nothing, or left only the claim itself. Nothing about the strength of the evidence predicts which group a charge ended up in.

Self-regulation arrives first because it needs nobody's vote

The pattern repeats closely enough to be worth naming. A charge is made against a new medium. A legislature takes an interest. Before it can act, the industry writes its own rules — and those rules outlive both the legislature's interest and the charge.

Comic book publishers formed an association and announced a code on 26 October 1954, six months after the Senate subcommittee hearings. The subcommittee itself had not found comics to be a cause of delinquency; it had recommended the industry tone itself down, and the industry went considerably further than that, policing content through its distributors rather than waiting for a law that would have had to survive a court. The code governed what American comics could show for a generation.

The video game industry did the same thing forty years later and faster. A Senate hearing in December 1993 screened footage from two games; a ratings board was in place by 1994. The legislation that followed in the statehouses did not last — in 2011 the Supreme Court struck down California's restriction on selling violent games to minors, holding that a state's interest in protecting children does not give it a free-floating power to restrict the ideas they may encounter. The ratings board is still there. It is the industry's permanent furniture and nobody now describes it as a concession.

The case that went the other way is film, and it is the reason the distinction matters. The hypnosis charge against early cinema was never tested; it was made moot. In 1915 the Supreme Court held that exhibiting films was a business rather than speech, which left the municipal and state censor boards with nothing to argue against, and film stayed outside the First Amendment for thirty-seven years. The industry wrote its production code in 1930 to forestall those boards. The Court reversed itself in 1952 over a licence New York had revoked for a short film. By then the claim about flicker and suggestibility had long since stopped being made, and the machinery it helped justify had outlasted it by decades.

The small effect is usually real. The large one never follows.

This is the part a page like this one is most likely to get wrong in the other direction, so it goes near the top.

Three of these charges had something underneath them, and in each case the measured thing is a fraction of the thing claimed.

A San Francisco physician interviewed two hundred children aged six to sixteen for the Journal of Pediatrics in 1941 and found more than ordinary nervousness in 76 per cent of the heavy radio listeners, against 40 per cent of the children who listened to nothing. That is a real finding, and the paper is worth reading for what it cannot do with it: the same pages describe crowded flats, absent alternatives and a radio in every room, and nothing in the method separates the listening from the conditions it arrived with. The study makes no finding at all on delinquency, which was the charge that got the attention.

The American Psychological Association revised its resolution on violent games in March 2020 and said two things at once: there is insufficient evidence for a causal link to violent behaviour, and there is a small, reliable association with aggressive outcomes of the yelling-and-pushing kind that is difficult to extend to violence. It revised the resolution because policymakers had been citing the earlier version as proof of the thing it did not establish.

And the oldest row on the page is the one where the question was eventually asked properly. The novel was accused of causing imitative death in 1774, and Goethe's book was banned in Leipzig, Copenhagen and parts of Italy — in places alongside the blue coat and yellow waistcoat its narrator wears. A 2023 study searched the German-language press archives for every suicide the papers had connected to the novel, confirmed most of the cases previously reported and found eight more, and its central observation is about the coverage: the papers wrote about a supposed epidemic and its moral meaning far more than about any individual death. Imitation after publicised deaths has been studied since the 1970s under the name the novel supplied. The effect is real, it is small, and it is the basis of the reporting guidance newspapers and broadcasters work to today. The charge was two and a half centuries ahead of its evidence, and when the evidence arrived it did not vindicate the ban.

What was never asked

Against that, the recurring structural feature of the rest.

In August 1921 the Ladies' Home Journal reported that syncopation had an atrophying effect on brain cells, on the authority of researchers it did not name. No study was produced then or since. The claim about jazz was carried entirely by citation to people who were never identified, and sixty-six years later the House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring jazz a national American treasure — the body that had received the complaints having changed its mind without the question ever being answered.

The subliminal advertising figures came from a press conference in 1957: a 57.5 per cent rise in popcorn sales, 18.1 per cent for Coca-Cola, across 45,699 viewers. In 1962 the researcher said he had made them up. He could not reproduce the sales when challenged, nobody has replicated them since, and the cinema's own manager is on record saying no such test was run. Twelve years after the claim and five after the retraction, the FCC issued a public notice holding that broadcasting by such techniques is contrary to the public interest; the Code of Federal Regulations still cross-references it. It is a policy statement rather than a rule, nothing has ever been fined under it, and the belief has comfortably outlived both the claim and its withdrawal.

The case brought in Nevada over backward masking is the closest any of these came to a test. The court ruled before trial that sounds below the threshold of awareness are not protected speech, heard six weeks of evidence, and dismissed the case on 24 August 1990 on the ground that the research did not establish that subliminal stimuli, even if perceived, could precipitate conduct of that magnitude. The sound at issue was identified in testimony as the singer exhaling. The ruling is barely cited, and the exercise of playing records backwards to find the message is still demonstrated to audiences who have never heard it was tried in court.

The Victorian version is cleaner still: the connection between cheap serial fiction and juvenile crime was asserted from the dock, not measured, and the historian who worked through the court reporting found the penny dreadful serving as a scapegoat for a crime rate whose shape it could not explain.

And the most recent instance has a number in it that behaved exactly like the popcorn figure. A May 2016 investigation connected about 130 Russian teenage deaths over five months to online groups. The 130 were never individually tied to a game or a network. One prosecution did follow, which is why the Blue Whale reports are not a simple row: a man who had pleaded guilty to inciting fifteen deaths was convicted in July 2017 of inciting two, and sentenced to three years and four months. Three years later, on the second wave, the British charities said they knew of no verified case, that the warnings schools and police forces were issuing rested on little evidence, and — the detail that should be better known — that the children's charity had taken more calls about it from journalists than from parents. Both charities said the publicity was itself the risk, because it told vulnerable children the game existed.

The row that runs the other way

One entry is on this page as a control, and it is the one worth reading twice.

In the 1920s the enclosed car was charged with being a bedroom on wheels: privacy, mobility and the rumble seat had taken young people out of sight of their parents, and that was what the machine was doing to the country. The charge was moral, unfalsifiable, and made by clergy and magistrates in the same newspapers that were carrying the other number.

Between 17,000 and 18,400 people were killed on American roads in 1923, depending on which of the contemporary counts you take — the compilers disagreed and none of them was a government. In New York City the year before, the newspaper count was 964 killed by cars, of whom 477 were children. While the moral charge ran, the motor trade was mounting the campaign that moved the fault for a collision from the driver to the person on foot and made a named offence of walking into the road.

Nothing was left of the bedroom-on-wheels charge. The toll was addressed decades later, by seat belts, licensing and road engineering, and by then the fault had been settled. A panic can be aimed at the wrong thing about a technology while a measurable harm sits beside it in the same pages, and what gets regulated is whichever one has a constituency.

The one that isn't settled

The last row is live, and including it is a risk the page takes deliberately.

The claim that the smartphone feed is behind the rise in adolescent anxiety and depression is unlike every charge above it in one respect that matters: it is made by researchers with the data in front of them and contested by researchers with the same data. The most careful official statement is still the 2023 US Surgeon General's advisory, which says that we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents. That is a statement about the state of the research. It is quoted constantly as a finding of harm, which it is not.

Meanwhile the statute already exists. Australia's minimum age came into force on 10 December 2025, requiring named platforms to take reasonable steps to keep under-sixteens off them, with the penalties falling on the companies. On the pattern of this page that is the familiar order of events — the rule arriving while the question is open — and that observation is not an argument against the rule. It may be the right call made early. The page cannot tell you, and a ledger that pretended otherwise would be committing the error it was built to describe.

What this page cannot establish

The selection is survivorship. These are charges that were not carried, assembled from a wiki category of exactly that kind of story, which guarantees the shape of the result. A page of charges that were carried would be a different and equally real page: lead in petrol and paint, tobacco, asbestos, thalidomide. Several of those were dismissed at the time in the same tone, by the same kind of authority, as the entries here.

It does not grade severity. A code that shaped an industry for a generation and a policy notice nobody has ever enforced both sit in the "something was left" column, and the rows do not say how much it cost to be wrong.

It does not establish that the charges were absurd when made. Three of them had a measurable effect underneath, the officials acting on the rest usually had the signatures of doctors or psychiatrists in front of them, and in the one case where the medical press answered within the year — the 1895 note on the bicycle, which treated moderate cycling as healthy and located the problem in saddle design — the newspapers carried on for four more years anyway.

What it does establish is narrower. Fifteen times, something new arrived and was accused of damaging the people using it; the large inference was never carried; and six times something was built in the meantime that is still there. The code, the statute and the standing practice are the durable output of these arguments — not the finding, which usually never came, and not the charge, which in nine cases went quietly.