5 Moral panics and health-related misinformation: When the audience becomes co-producer

This contribution discusses how the notion of moral panic is challenged in the digital context, where the relationships between the moral entrepreneurs and the folk devils can become much more complex andfluid as digital affordances create shifts in the distribution of mediatic power. By relying on a digital passive ethnography carried out on Italian-speaking digital fields, we discuss how the notion of moral panic can still be useful as a critical tool and organising framework, confirming its continuing practical and heuristic value once we widen and tighten the focus of analysis, redefining moral panics’ traditional parameters in light of the increasingly complex and contradictory nature of powers in society.