Silence

The spiral of silence is very prevalent in the world today. It can affect people and their ideas, but it is interesting because depending on where they are, the silence or majority opinion can be from a different perspective. The pressure to be in the majority is really strong, we as humans want to fit into a community and can even mold ourselves to fit that main idea.

This can be seen with memes in social media. A meme can bond people and get others to rally around the same idea. It can get a simple idea to spread really fast and even put a social idea out there and make it the majority opinion. One example is the pronunciation of the word "gif" file. The big fight over how it was said caused a divide at first, but when a majority settled on an opinion, it became a norm that should not be broken unless you want to be ridiculed. This caused people to change their opinion or to stay silent and just not say the file name.
This is a small example, but it is known enough that when you apply this to politics or other controversial issues it will follow the same pattern. After a norm is settled upon, then if you are not with the majority, you will stay silent in fear of ridicule by censoring yourself in the media climate.