At present, it can be stated that the mass media has become the subject of creating provocative discourse and, as a result, the producer of many social phobias, including very dangerous ones. This is due to the desire of many publications, including online, to attract a wide audience, which is dictated more often by selfish interest. It is the tragic and disastrous events that attract and excite the audience, giving rise to a variety of very broad spectrum feelings with the highest possible emotional intensity - horror, fear, disgust, panic, sympathy and empathy. At the same time, mass media are not limited to just informing about disasters, but massively implant into the minds of recipients almost at the suggestion level lexical frames of despair, hopelessness, confusion and confusion. The texts often use threatening forms, and the subject of the threat is natural, social, man-made disasters. The media form stable phobias in people that are socially very dangerous. The aim of the study is to identify these phobias, their causes, genesis, thematic spectrum, social determinants, the level of influence. The object of study is mass media publications of various typological levels - from local to major national publications, including online. Even high-quality world-famous publications sometimes create provocative discourse. The study will use empirical methods for the axiological identification of texts containing potential social phobias. A comparative analysis of different types of publications that provoke an audience, create a stressful environment, causing social phobias will also be used. This will help describe the effects of anxiety disorder caused by the media, as well as the social danger of provoking people. It is also important to establish the mechanisms of generation under the influence of media publications, first of all of such social phobias as cognitive and behavioral. The mass media often not only cause panic, but also specifically allows a biased assessment of what is happening, in particular, they increase the effect of the inevitability of the global environmental crisis due to the depletion of the planet’s resources, loss, pollution of the biosphere. These factors affect people even at the level of microsocial groups and form negative psychological patterns that are asocial in nature. They reveal such dangerous features as anger, cruelty, inclination to violence and at the same time - skepticism, wariness, suspicion, neglect of social norms of morality. It is important to recognize and explain them. At the level of public discussions, it is necessary to identify patterns and trends in the negative impact of the media on society, to hold scientific events dedicated to this, which will help to determine with necessary accuracy the mechanisms of negative impact of the media on society that generate social phobias.