Creating Spirals of Silence

In any room full of people, we look to other people in the room to decide what's likely to be true or false. A famous experiment in the early 1950s since been replicated many times shows that three quarters of us humans will disagree with the evidence of our own eyes three quarters of the time. This is something that dictatorships have known about and done for many decades. There's nothing new about creating spirals of silence. They can break very quickly when people look around and realize, hey, wait a minute, we're all being spoofed here.