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Europe and the Refugee Response

Europe and the Refugee Response

The Moral Panic Button 1 Construction and consequences

In early 2015, as an answer to the sharp drop of their popularity and to re-gain the sympathy of its voters, the Hungarian government fabricated the Moral Panic Button (MPB), an institutionalized form of fearmongering focused on the threat of migration and a world-wide conspiracy against Hungary. Although MPB is similar to a government-initiated moral panic, it requires a fear-mongering system, based on strong governmental control of the media, the use of various propaganda instruments, and the continuous selection of scapegoats. To explore how MPB works, we examined the use of various tools to maintain the moral panic. Our results show that in the short-run MPB made the Hungarian society extremely xenophobic and successfully streamlined intolerant thinking of the entire society, while in the long-term, it dissolves European values such as solidarity.

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