Creating a False Consensus | Influencers vs. Truth

Beware when 'everyone' moves in lockstep.

Welcome to Influencers vs. Truth, a new series where I examine the strategies often used by political influencers to recruit viewers to their point of view. I think this is needed for three reasons: firstly, online influencers have a range of new strategies that they have been using to convince people of their positions, and these have been much more effective than the old strategies used by TV talking heads and talk radio personalities. Secondly, recent revelations have shined a light on the fact that many online influencers are likely being paid gigantic sums of money to push certain talking points. Finally, the combination of these things has meant that more and more people have been converted to extremist or otherwise unsound positions on a wide range of issues, as a result of the work of influencers aligned with the far-left or the far-right. I'm concerned that this could be a major contributor to the political polarization we are seeing, and the fact that we don't seem to be living in the same universe of objective facts anymore.

In this first installment, I'm going to talk about how influencers create a false sense of consensus, and the dangerous effects this could have. I've been paying attention to the world of online political influencers for about seven years now, and I've seen this in action many, many times. It was during the pandemic, when we were all stuck at home watching too many YouTube videos, that I first became consciously aware of this. I noticed that a certain subset of right-aligned influencers kept taking the same stances on a wide range of topics, including topics regarding the pandemic, as well as regarding things like BLM and the 2020 US Elections. Their lockstep agreement struck me as unusual, even for a group of people aligned with the Republican Party, because there was actually a much wider range of views within the Republican Party itself on these issues in the real world. For example, back in around April 2020, many Republican elected officials held the view that they should focus on sorting out the pandemic first, then campaign hard in the summer, because they expected the pandemic to go away by August back then, but none of the influencers seemed to have any sympathy for this view. Republicans were also split on whether Trump should take up one or more culture war campaigns, but all the influencers were fully in on the culture wars, with no exceptions. It became clear to me that all these influencers were only representing the views of one part of the Republican Party, not even the whole Republican Party, but they were trying to portray these views as the widespread consensus of people who had 'common sense', ignoring all the very real and very valid disagreements that were actually happening in reality.

Once I became aware that these influencers were trying to pretend that the views of one faction of one party were the consensus view, I noticed even more unusual things happening. Like how these influencers would all promote certain books at around the same time, generating a sense of buzz, when such buzz was clearly missing in the real world. I mean, most of the time I couldn't even find the promoted book at my local bookstore. Or how, in early 2021, they all jumped up and down when Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to stop publishing six titles deemed to have racist content, even though there was almost no real world interest in this piece of obscure news. I mean, it's a stretch even calling it 'cancel culture', because it's not like somebody actually had their career ruined, or was threatened into silence and submission in any way. It was just that six of the less popular Seuss books, out of a catalog of more than sixty, would not be printed anymore. The rest of the world couldn't care less. But the influencers kept trying to manufacture outrage for about a week.

This weird lockstep behavior was happening on more fundamental issues too. For example, by late 2021, they had all turned against the 'classical liberalism' they were championing just one or two years ago, and were singing praises of the new illiberal 'National Conservatism' movement. Somehow, all of them believed, just like myself, that it was important to uphold classical liberal values against wokeness in 2019, and what the West needed was more free speech. However, all of them had a change of heart by 2021, and now saw liberalism itself as responsible for wokeness, and what the West needed was to give up on classical liberalism itself! In a roundabout way, they had all managed to become enemies of the version of themselves from just two years ago!

The first question that came to my mind was, why weren't these people challenged for their nonsense? The answer was clear: they mostly only collaborated with those who moved in lockstep with them. In other words, they were making strange behavior and awkward moves look more natural by doing it together, and holding conversations where they justified each others' talking points. What they were doing was manufacturing a false consensus. In the real world, people were not giving up on classical liberalism en masse during 2021. But somehow, in right-wing influencer world, it seemed like a real shift was really happening, and 'everyone' was getting behind it. The fact that the arguments for classical liberal values that were valid in 2019 would still be valid two years later was ignored by 'everyone', and voices from the outside that could carry this point of view were of course excluded from the show. Later on, it would turn out that all this was a prelude to the launch of a new brand of big government, illiberal culture war politics, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's infamous War on Disney as the first big move. The aforementioned influencers would all go on to become DeSantis fans, justifying his every move, even as they seriously infringed upon the value of free speech.

I believe what we saw here was an example of a group of influencers manufacturing the appearance of a consensus, to justify a controversial political program. The goal here was to loosen the viewer's previous commitment to classical liberal values, so that they would not get in the way of the new political program. I think this is very Orwellian indeed.