Contagion of Self-Censorship

Vincent discusses the “spiral of silence” and self-censorship. Connecting to Baillie’s article on the emergence of social norms, self-censorship could be diffused across a network, whether consciously or subconsciously. Depending on the typology of a network, ideas can spread fairly efficiently. According to Baillie’s article, an amorphous network allows group consensus to form in an infinitely scalable form. With this idea, perhaps implicit ideas can also spread in the same manner as explicit ideas. In this case, perhaps this is currently happening with self-censorship on the internet since everyone has some form of access to another. People may be subconsciously picking up that others are not avidly speaking out with dissenting opinions and are mimicking that behavior by also not speaking up if their opinion drastically deviates from the norm. In a way, this could be considered priming. By not seeing dissenting opinions, this could prime someone to be more agreeable to the common consensus on topics. By seeing agreement, it could encourage people to join the general sway because of social pressure. The idea being primed is agreement, and the way it is primed is by the lack of visible counter points in online discussions.