Preface: Following the previous article, this piece was completed in collaboration with ChatGPT.

“Informal opinion systems” are ways opinions are created and spread without media, institutions, or public forums. They do not need authority, do not require facts to be consistent, and do not take responsibility for correcting mistakes. Yet they can influence real decisions for a long time.

This system is based on personal trust, not on truth. Opinions move through friendships, emotions, and shared identity. Who gets believed depends on who you are and your relationship to others, not on whether what you say is correct. Because of this, the system looks decentralized, but in practice it is often controlled by a few key people.

In this system, information matters less than position. Repeating something is a way of showing where you stand. Agreeing signals which side you are on. Even silence becomes a structural statement. Gossip is the most common and effective carrier here because it is vague, private, and easy to reshape. It spreads without leaving clear responsibility.

From a communication-studies perspective, informal public opinion systems tend to become active under three conditions: the failure of authority, the destabilization of order, or the upward movement of an individual’s position that has not yet been formally recognized by the structure. This is not an anomaly, but a normal response during periods of power vacuum. Formal public opinion answers the question “what should we think”; informal public opinion answers “which side should we stand on.”

At their core, these three conditions point to the same problem: the original criteria for judgment have ceased to function, while new ones have not yet taken shape. It is precisely in this gap that the informal public opinion system is activated.

First, authority failure. Authority does not mean simply that “someone has the final say,” but that “most people tacitly accept a particular source as having the right to define reality.” When institutions, leaders, professional identities, or established rules lose credibility, people do not stop making judgments—they simply lose a shared coordinate system. Judgment power is then pushed down to the most primitive and accessible level: those around us. Whoever seems to “know more,” appears to have “inside information,” or is “close to certain people” temporarily occupies the position of authority. At this point, whether information is true or false becomes secondary; what matters is whether it fills uncertainty. Gossip emerges here as a “temporary explanatory system,” offering the comforting illusion that “at least I know what’s going on.”

Next, the destabilization of order. Order does not primarily refer to rules themselves, but to the stability of positions. When resources, opportunities, voice, or relational structures begin to shift, previously clear hierarchies and boundaries blur, triggering instinctive anxiety. In unstable orders, the greatest risk is not failure, but not knowing what one currently counts as. The function of the informal public opinion system here is rapid re-labeling: who is rising, who is falling, who is “no longer doing well,” who “seems to have issues lately.” These judgments require no evidence—only repetition. They help the group regain a sense of orientation amid chaos, even if that orientation is wrong.

The third condition is the most critical and the most easily overlooked: an individual’s position has moved upward, but the structure has not yet acknowledged it. This is where tension peaks. When a person’s capability, influence, or independence has leapt forward while they remain confined to an old label, their very existence threatens the surrounding structure. Not because of anything they have done, but because they demonstrate that the old ranking criteria are no longer reliable. In such cases, the informal public opinion system often intervenes proactively, using gossip to pull the individual back into a controllable range. This is rarely done through direct denial, but through indirect contamination—questioning motives, character, emotional stability, or relational boundaries—transforming “upward movement” into “problematic individual.” This is the most typical form of structural backlash.

Viewed together, these three dynamics reveal a cold but clear pattern: the informal public opinion system is not about transmitting facts, but about repairing structure. It provides substitute explanations when authority collapses, temporary rankings when order wavers, and damping mechanisms when individuals rise too fast. It does not care about truth; it cares only about whether the structure can continue to operate.

This logic aligns closely with Edward Bernays’s assertion that public judgment is not based on facts, but on social cues. The difference is that Bernays examined manipulation at the macro level, while what I'm writing about here is spontaneous operation at the micro, interpersonal level.

The informal public opinion system is not a by-product of loss of control, but a self-rescue mechanism activated before a system fully collapses. It is ugly, distorted, and harmful precisely because it assumes functions that should have been carried by formal structures, but no longer can be. Gossip is not merely idle chatter; it is a low-cost, high-penetration, decentralized form of informal communication. Its persistence and effectiveness come from the fact that it bypasses institutions, fact-checking, and accountability, embedding itself directly in interpersonal networks.

As for its purpose: the primary aim of gossip is not to transmit information, but to reorganize relational structures. By talking about a third party, the speaker accomplishes three things simultaneously. First, they test alignment—whether the listener is “on my side.” Second, they manufacture shared secrets, rapidly consolidating alliances. Third, they symbolically process the absent person, compressing a complex human being into a circulable label. Many instances of gossip are indifferent to truth; what matters is whether they successfully push someone outside the boundary of “us,” or lock them into a lower-status image. Gossip is a tool of social positioning, not communication.

In terms of method, gossip almost always appears disguised as “private,” “out of concern,” or “I really shouldn’t say this.” It does not spread through public channels, but hops along chains of trust, with each retelling subtly adjusted to fit the listener’s psychological needs. This form of transmission does not pursue completeness, only retellability. The more vague, emotional, and imagination-provoking the information, the more likely it is to be passed on. Precisely because there is no clear source, responsibility is continuously diluted, eventually producing a false consensus of “everyone says so.”

Structurally, gossip tends to attach upward and press downward within groups. It is more readily used to attack those with blurred boundaries, rising positions, or diminishing controllability. The reason is simple: stable structures do not need gossip; unstable ones do. When gossip becomes active, it usually signals that an existing power arrangement is failing, while no new, recognized order has yet replaced it.

Its key difference from public relations or news dissemination lies here: it does not need to persuade the masses, only to tilt emotions at critical nodes. This insight already existed in early public-relations theory. Bernays explicitly noted that while lies are inefficient in the long run, emotional narratives and social cues can shape judgment frameworks without detection. Gossip is the extreme simplification of this mechanism at the level of everyday interpersonal interaction.

Gossip is not a low-level form of communication; it is a primitive but highly efficient technology of power. What is truly dangerous is not any single statement, but the structural consequences produced through its sustained operation: who is believed, who is excluded, who must constantly prove themselves, and who never has to explain. Once this is clear, gossip ceases to be an emotional issue and becomes a phenomenon that can be dissected, analyzed, and written about rigorously.

The real consequences of gossip go far beyond “misunderstanding” or “reputational damage”; they are structural problems. Once someone enters the informal public opinion system, the effects are often irreversible, and responsibility is nearly impossible to trace.

The most immediate consequence is the systematic contamination of judgment. When gossip becomes a primary information source, people stop evaluating based on facts, competence, or behavior, and instead rely on “I heard,” “it feels like,” or “everyone seems to think so.” This leads to a dangerous shift: correct behavior no longer guarantees positive feedback, while fitting the prevailing narrative becomes the condition for survival. Over time, environments reward conformity and punish independence, and real information degrades into noise.

The second problem is the self-justification trap imposed on individuals. Once someone is marked by gossip, they find that everything they do requires additional explanation, and those explanations are then treated as evidence of guilt or instability. Silence is read as tacit admission; response as emotionality; clarification as defensiveness. This is a classic structural loop, and once formed, it is almost impossible to escape through individual effort.

More deeply, gossip steadily erodes collective trust. While it appears to create intimacy through “private exchange,” in the long run it teaches everyone the same lesson: anyone can be discussed, defined, and traded in their absence. The result is not greater cohesion, but pervasive insecurity. People conceal their true thoughts, reduce genuine interaction, and avoid risk, lowering the efficiency of organizations and social networks.

Another frequently overlooked issue is the pathological solidification of power structures. Gossip may appear anti-authoritarian, but it is deeply conservative. It systematically suppresses those who do not rely on relationships or submit to old hierarchies, because they threaten existing informal power nodes. Over time, those most skilled at manipulating gossip gain discursive advantage, while genuinely capable individuals who refuse to engage in it are marginalized. This is not accidental; it is a structural outcome.

Finally, there are long-term psychological and social costs. For individuals, prolonged exposure to gossip environments produces hyper-vigilance, self-censorship, and trust erosion, even leading to aversion toward public expression itself. For groups, it generates low-quality consensus: surface-level agreement masking internal fragmentation, where everyone performs correctness but no one truly believes in one another.

There is no way to completely eliminate gossip. Wherever interpersonal relations exist, it will appear. The only viable option is to render it ineffective, rather than fantasize about its disappearance.

Effective solutions never lie in “telling people not to talk,” but in rebuilding the source of judgment. Gossip thrives because it substitutes for something absent: authority, order, or clear structure. Once those elements are restored, gossip naturally degrades into background noise.

The first step is returning judgment to verifiable structures. When evaluation, decision-making, division of labor, and responsibility have clear and public criteria, people no longer need private circulation to “read the wind.” This does not require the system to be just, only clear, stable, and predictable. Gossip fears not rebuttal, but irrelevance—the moment when “this does not require private discussion to be decided.” Once facts, processes, and boundaries are institutionalized, gossip loses its function.

The second step is cutting off the self-justification trap. For individuals, the real danger is not gossip itself, but being drawn into responding to it. Responses, clarifications, and explanations are reprocessed within the informal system, reinforcing the mark. The only effective approach is to refuse to fight on informal terrain and force all necessary responses back into formal channels. Not “explaining what I didn’t do,” but “I am only accountable to formal processes.” This approach is cold, but it is the only way to starve gossip.

The third step is clarifying who has the authority to define reality. Gossip spreads on the assumption that no one knows who decides. Once it is clear which judgments are made by whom and according to what standards, informal opinion rapidly loses momentum. Not because people suddenly become rational, but because continued circulation no longer yields structural returns. Gossip is a positional bet; when the bet stops paying off, people withdraw.

The fourth step is acknowledging and addressing structural backlash. When someone’s position rises without recognition, gossip often functions as collective defense. In such cases, the solution is not self-restraint, but forcing structural update: either formally recognize the change or explicitly reject it. Ambiguity is gossip’s ideal breeding ground. Once the structure gives an answer—even a negative one—informal attacks quickly subside.

Gossip is not a moral failing, but a symptom of governance failure. Wherever it appears, it signals that formal communication, formal judgment, and formal accountability have failed to keep pace with reality. This aligns with Bernays’s insight: people are driven not by facts, but by who appears to control the situation. Gossip is simply the spontaneous version of this mechanism at the interpersonal scale.