The Problem With Big Crowds..

[moobu2]

83. Big crowds are easy to manipulate.

It's a well studied psychological phenomenon.

Crowd Manipulation on Wikipedia

Crowd manipulation is the intentional use of techniques based on the principles of crowd psychology to engage, control, or influence the desires of a crowd in order to direct its behavior toward a specific action.[1] This practice is common to politics and business and can facilitate the approval or disapproval or indifference to a person, policy, or product. The ethicality of crowd manipulation is commonly questioned.
Crowd manipulation differs from propaganda although they may reinforce one another to produce a desired result. If propaganda is "the consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group",[2] crowd manipulation is the relatively brief call to action once the seeds of propaganda (i.e. more specifically "pre-propaganda"[3]) are sown and the public is organized into a crowd. The propagandist appeals to the masses, even if compartmentalized, whereas the crowd manipulator appeals to a segment of the masses assembled into a crowd in real time. In situations such as a national emergency, however, a crowd manipulator may leverage mass media to address the masses in real time as if speaking to a crowd.[4]

More at the link