Perhaps. If you think of irrational or uninformed fears as memes (in the classic sense, not the "pictures with captions" sense) that propagate through a society, the Internet provides mechanisms for those memes to spread much more quickly, and with far less resistance, than before.
At the same time, these same communications mechanisms allow falsehoods to be debunked much more effectively, assuming that readers would rather believe hard boring truths than comfortable exciting falsehoods. Then again, I've seen enough people (even on HN!) say things like, "I would rather be passionate about a lie than bored by a truth" (paraphrasing) that I wonder if even this is true.
