Bystanders Paranoia 

To feel fear, or to feel threatened, from a situation that you have little control over or that you are not directly affected by. The overwhelming fear is usually not caused by the situation itself but by people exaggerating information to make you obsess over what's going on.

Bystanders Paranoia (or Citizens Paranoia) is different from feeling legitimate fear for yourself and your loved ones due to an outside force that has a significant of hurting you.

Bystanders Paranoia is fear that is, most of the time, brought on by political discourse, in which news sources and journalists over-hype to get you to feel more dependent on said news sources.

The fear will then cause the affected to spend every moment of their time focusing on nothing but how the news tells them to feel about the situation, afraid and unsafe.

Those affected by Bystanders Paranoia will be unable to recognize that the people telling them these stories are only manipulating their fear to get them to listen to more monotonous, disingenuous reports on the situation.

Boy 1: I'm kind of worried about Leann, she been doing nothing but watching CNN and reading ABC News for days. She always seems like she's terrified of something.
Girl 1: I think those news channels gave her Bystanders Paranoia. Poor thing.
Boy 2: I fucking hate journalists. All of them are fags.

Bystanders Paranoia by chatterbug779 August 1, 2021