CONSTRUCTION OF MORAL PANIC ON TWITTER ABOUT GIVING CHILDREN COVID-19 VACCINES: THE EXAMPLE OF "#DenekDegilBebek"

Ardıç Çobaner, Aslıhan | Kılınç Özüölmez, Pelin | Alkan, Nermin

Moral panic is a useful concept in terms of understanding and explaining the expression of fear and concern over an event that arises in the society in the triangle of power/power relations-public and the media. This study aimed to understand the construction of a process in which the fears and sensitivities of families towards the administration of the Covid-19 vaccines to children have risen in Turkey and created a kind of moral panic in terms of the hashtag #DenekDegilBebek. Following the statement that “Babies are ‘accidentally’ vaccinated against Covid-19” made by Prof. Dr. Zafer Kurugöl, who is an academic member of Ege University, Faculty of Medicine, to the NTV news bulletin on September 22, 2021, the hashtag has quickly become a trend topic (TT) on Twitter’s agenda on September 23, 2021. For the purpose of this study, the hashtag #DenekDegilBebek, which is ranked of popular posts in the Twitter search engine, and 150 tweets that include this hashtag were analyzed by content analysis. In the study, it is concluded that an already existing fear and concern of families against vaccines has played a significant role in facilitating the construction of moral panic, however the reaction of families was quickly turned into a moral panic by anti- vaccine accounts on ...