The manufacture of consensus: How online debate became managed opinion

AARON SWARTZ believed the internet could set knowledge free.

That may sound naïve now, after years of bot farms, algorithmic manipulation, political pile-ons and online communities moderated into ideological uniformity. Yet the early promise of the internet was real. It offered ordinary people a route around the old gatekeepers, where information could be shared and power could be challenged. Arguments could be made without waiting for permission from editors, broadcasters, universities or political parties.

Swartz embodied that promise more than almost anyone. As a teenager, he helped shape RSS (a web feed format that lets people subscribe to updates from websites, blogs, podcasts or news sites without having to visit each site manually). He worked on Creative Commons (a non-profit organisation that provides free copyright licences). He was involved in the creation of Reddit. He campaigned against censorship and believed that knowledge, especially knowledge produced with public money, should not be locked away from the public.

His story is told powerfully in the documentary The Internet’s Own Boy, still freely available on YouTube. It is worth watching, not simply because it tells the story of a brilliant young man driven to despair after the American state pursued him over the downloading of academic papers, but because it reminds us what the internet was supposed to be.

Reddit, in particular, was born from that older vision of the web: messy, open, argumentative, democratic and decentralised. It was meant to allow communities to form around shared interests and open discussion. Yet, like so many platforms, it has often become the opposite of what its founders hoped for. Instead of freeing debate from gatekeepers, it has created thousands of smaller gatekeepers, each with the power to decide what may be said, what may be buried, and who may remain.

This is a concern because modern politics is no longer fought only through speeches, manifestos or newspaper columns. It is fought through the appearance of consensus.

Astroturfing takes its name from artificial grass. In politics, it means manufacturing the appearance of grassroots opinion. Sometimes this involves fake accounts. Sometimes it involves coordinated activist networks. Sometimes it involves campaign groups, special advisers and friendly media figures all pushing the same message until it appears to have emerged naturally from the public.

winning the argument is often less important than controlling the emotional weather in which the argument takes place

The point is not always to persuade. Often it is enough to make people feel alone.

If voters believe their view is a minority view, even when it may not be, many will think twice before expressing it. They may still hold the same belief privately, but they become quieter in public. The more they withdraw, the more dominant the approved opinion appears. Silence is then mistaken for agreement, and agreement is used to justify further silence.

That is the genius of manufactured consensus. It does not need to defeat dissent in open debate. It merely has to make dissent feel socially costly.

Scotland has seen this pattern clearly in the independence debate. For years, observers noted suspicious networks of accounts amplifying nationalist messages online. Some appeared to be linked to Iranian bot activity, displaying a curious enthusiasm for Scottish constitutional politics from thousands of miles away. Even more curious was their habit of falling silent whenever Iran suffered major internet disruption or power outages, only to reappear afterwards.

Perhaps Tehran’s interest in Scottish independence is just one of those touching international friendships we hear so much about.

Or perhaps the purpose was to create atmosphere: to make one side seem larger, louder, more confident and more inevitable than it really was.

The same culture has been visible on Reddit. For years, r/Scotland developed a reputation as a forum where nationalist assumptions dominated and critics of the SNP, unionists or awkward questioners often found themselves removed, downvoted into invisibility or banned. That has begun to change, partly because political reality in Scotland has changed, but for a long time the forum gave the impression of a country far more uniform in its politics than Scotland has ever been.

I once tested this for myself.

Under a pro-independence account, I posted a series of poster designs featuring Nicola Sturgeon alongside quotations about nationalism, socialism and independence. They were enthusiastically received. Hundreds of upvotes followed. Comment threads filled with approval. The designs were treated as powerful, inspiring and politically useful.

The quotations were Adolf Hitler’s.

Nobody noticed until one user eventually recognised them. At that point the spell broke. The posts disappeared and I was banned.

The episode was funny in one sense, but revealing in another. The words had not changed. Only their attributed source had changed. While users believed they were reading sentiments aligned with their own tribe, they applauded. Once the origin became known, the same words became unacceptable.

This is how ideological conformity works. It trains people to recognise signals rather than think.

During Covid, the pattern spread far beyond Scottish nationalism. Across Twitter, public bodies, media organisations, activist networks and political parties, an approved line hardened quickly. Questions about lockdowns, vaccine mandates, school closures, civil liberties or the long-term social consequences of emergency government were often treated as dangerous in themselves.

The language was soft. Be kind. Trust the science. Protect the NHS. Keep people safe.

Yet the enforcement was anything but soft. Accounts were suspended. Alternative views were suppressed. Professionals were ostracised. People who raised concerns later accepted as legitimate were, at the time, treated as cranks, extremists or threats to public health.

A society that cannot question emergency powers has already surrendered more than it realises.

This habit did not vanish after Covid. It became part of the broader political culture. On Twitter before Elon Musk, whole fields of discussion were narrowed by moderation, activist pressure and elite consensus. When Musk loosened the platform’s restrictions, many of those who had previously presented themselves as defenders of open debate fled to Bluesky, a platform whose appeal lay largely in its promise of ideological comfort.

They did not want the public square. They wanted a managed garden.

The same tendency can be seen in professional activist organisations such as Led By Donkeys. Their campaigns are often clever, polished and effective. They use projections, stunts, videos and social media clips to generate media attention and create the appearance of public judgement descending from nowhere. Their supporters call it creative activism. Their critics see a professionalised form of narrative warfare dressed in the clothes of spontaneous public outrage.

The method matters more than the target. In modern politics, winning the argument is often less important than controlling the emotional weather in which the argument takes place.

That is why astroturfing, moderation bias and activist campaigning all belong in the same discussion. They are different techniques serving a similar purpose: to create a sense of inevitability around one view and social risk around another.

This is also why The Reformer must take care not to become merely a mirror image of what it criticises. Supporting Reform does not mean treating Reform as beyond criticism. Quite the opposite. If the old parties have failed because they became complacent, insulated and contemptuous of ordinary voters, then any serious challenger must be held to a higher standard from the beginning.

The point is not to replace one manufactured consensus with another. It is to restore the conditions in which honest disagreement can breathe.

manufactured consensus cannot abolish reality

Reform’s rise is part of a wider rebellion against managed opinion. Across Britain, voters have grown tired of being lectured by people who appear to despise them. They are tired of being told that their concerns are illegitimate, their instincts dangerous and their doubts morally suspect. The collapse of trust in old institutions did not come from nowhere. It was earned.

In Scotland, the SNP’s long dominance is visibly weakening under the weight of scandal, financial controversy, policy failure and public fatigue. The Sturgeon era, once presented as almost untouchable, now looks far more brittle in retrospect. Labour’s recovery already feels shallower than its supporters hoped. The old political certainties are cracking because voters are no longer prepared to confuse volume with truth.

For years, dissenting people were warned that they stood outside the respectable mainstream. They were told they were few in number. They were told decent people did not think as they did.

Then they looked around and realised millions of others had been thinking the same things in silence.

That is the danger for every system of manufactured consensus. It can dominate a screen, a forum, a hashtag or a newsroom. It can give cowards the confidence of numbers and make the majority feel isolated. It can bury arguments for a time.

But it cannot abolish reality.

Sooner or later, people compare what they are told with what they can see. When the gap becomes too wide, they stop believing the performance.

The tragedy of the modern internet is that a tool built to liberate knowledge has so often been used to discipline opinion. Aaron Swartz imagined a web that would weaken gatekeepers. Instead, new gatekeepers emerged, less formal but often more censorious, armed with moderation tools, activist networks and the power to make dissent disappear quietly.

Yet the old promise is not entirely dead.

Every time someone refuses to be shamed into silence, every time an argument breaks through the approved narrative, every time voters punish those who treated them with contempt, something of that original democratic spirit survives.

The task now is not simply to win elections. It is to recover the habit of free argument.

Without that, politics turns into theatre and consensus into performance, so democracy becomes little more than a managed conversation between people who already agree.