You scroll through your feed and notice that a striking number of people seem to believe NATO is a threat to Estonia’s sovereignty. A comment section appears overwhelmingly hostile to the government’s defence spending. You begin to wonder, have I misjudged public opinion all along?
You probably haven’t. What you may be experiencing is the majority illusion — a structural feature of social networks that allows a fringe minority to appear like a dominant consensus.
How It Works
Described in a 2016 paper by USC computer scientist Kristina Lerman, the majority illusion exploits a simple asymmetry: a small number of highly connected accounts appear in the feeds of a disproportionately large share of all users. Whatever position they amplify gets seen by nearly everyone, while the quieter majority barely registers. A fringe position, placed in the right nodes, acquires the texture of consensus.
The Kremlin has operationalized this for years. To manufacture the impression that a pro-Kremlin narrative dominates Estonia’s Russian-speaking community, it is not necessary to convince most people—only to seed it through strategically positioned accounts. Bots amplify each other. Influencers are paid or pressured to repeat the message. Re:Baltica research found that pro-Kremlin Telegram channels targeting Baltic Russian speakers are not primarily seeking large audiences — their main role is to simulate consensus.
The effect is twofold: internal demoralization of those who hold different views (who go quiet, feeding the illusion further), and external distortion as Western observers misread the manufactured consensus as genuine public opinion.
KOOS: The Majority Illusion as a Political Claim
Estonia offers a textbook example of the majority illusion deployed not just through networks but stated openly as political fact.
The pro-Kremlin KOOS (Together) party failed to enter parliament in the March 2023 Riigikogu elections — its candidates received a few thousand personal votes each, the coalition list fell below the 5% threshold, and neither leader Aivo Peterson nor board member Oleg Ivanov was elected. By any measure, the result confirmed a small, geographically concentrated protest vote.
The party’s own reading was the opposite. As Ivanov departed Estonia for Russia in May 2023 — fleeing potential arrest by the Internal Security Service—he told Estonian public broadcaster ERR that KOOS had received “overwhelming backing” and claimed, “We are supported by a majority of non-citizens, primarily Russian citizens — we also win local elections in Narva, Kohtla-Järve, Sillamäe and the two largest districts of Tallinn.” The authorities, he said, had imprisoned Peterson precisely because they feared this majority.
In the 2024 European Parliament elections, KOOS scored 19.6% in Ida-Viru County at its peak and 3.9% in Tallinn. A majority nowhere. Yet amplified through Kremlin-linked Telegram channels and appearances on Russian state television, the narrative of a suppressed Russian majority in Estonia circulated persistently — and in the closed information environment of Russian-speaking communities, it did its work. Moderate voices who privately disagreed had little reason to speak up against what looked, from inside the bubble, like overwhelming sentiment.
The illusion did not need to be true. It only needed to be believed.
When the Propagandist Believes His Own Propaganda
There is a darker variant of the majority illusion—one that does not merely deceive an audience, but ultimately deceives the deceiver himself.
On 24 February 2022, Russian forces advanced on Kyiv in a column expected to reach the capital within days. The operational planning assumed a political collapse rather than a military campaign: that Ukrainian officials would flee, that resistance would evaporate, and that Russian troops — framed on state television as liberators arriving to rescue Russian speakers from “neo-Nazis” — would be greeted with relief by a population waiting to be freed. Putin’s fundamental assumption was that Ukrainians and Russians were “one people” and that Ukrainian independence was an artificial Western construct. Russian troops were told they would be treated as liberators. They were not.
No Ukrainian region welcomed the invading army. While instances of collaboration were recorded in occupied areas, these proved to be the exception rather than the rule, dwarfed by the scale of Ukraine’s resistance. In March 2022, 98% of Ukrainians — including 82% of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine — said they did not believe that any part of Ukraine was rightfully part of Russia. The regions Russia claimed to be protecting — the Russian-speaking cities of the south and east — were reduced to rubble by Russian strikes, and their populations, previously more sympathetic to Russia, underwent a radical rethink.
How did Russian planning so completely misread this? The majority illusion, operating in reverse. For years, Russia’s information operations had flooded Telegram channels, social media, and state television with content suggesting that Ukrainian Russian speakers were alienated from Kyiv, sympathetic to Moscow, and ready to welcome reintegration. Russian soldiers were explicitly told they would be welcomed as heroes by civilians they were “liberating.” The Kremlin had spent a decade manufacturing and amplifying this narrative — and its own intelligence apparatus, operating inside the same closed information ecosystem, appears to have treated the manufactured consensus as real. Putin’s isolated decision-making created a dangerous echo chamber where dissenting views about Ukrainian capabilities and potential Western responses were not adequately considered.
The majority illusion had been so effectively seeded into Russian-facing networks that the Russians who built it ended up consuming it.
AI Makes It Worse
Generative AI has transformed the scale of the problem. A 2025 EU report found that 27% of foreign influence attempts globally involved AI — nearly three times the previous year’s figure. AI does not merely amplify existing nodes; it multiplies them, deploying thousands of contextually responsive personas across different communities simultaneously. The statistical conditions for the majority illusion can now be manufactured at industrial scale with minimal human labour.
What Can Be Done
Three responses matter most:
- Platform-level intervention: modest changes to which accounts are highly visible can significantly reduce the distortion — the EU’s Digital Services Act is a lever worth pressing.
- Counter-seeding: credible local voices, journalists, and community leaders need to occupy high-degree positions in the same networks being targeted, not just broadcast from outside them.
- Media literacy with network awareness: citizens need to understand not just how to evaluate individual claims, but that their feed is not a representative sample of their community — and that the appearance of consensus can be engineered.
Conclusion
The majority illusion is the load-bearing structure of modern information operations. When Kremlin-aligned actors plant narratives in a handful of well-connected nodes, they are not trying to persuade the majority. They are trying to make you believe the majority has already been persuaded.
A fringe that looks like a majority is still a fringe. The question is whether we can see it clearly — or whether we have already started to go quiet.
