Strategic Silence and Politicized Speech

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to argue that, when confronted with a specific form of harmful speech, strategic silence can function as a counterspeech strategy that, under certain conditions, outperforms its alternatives. In public contexts characterized by a systematic conflation of the descriptive and the evaluative, usual counterspeech strategies risk amplifying messages that are detrimental to already marginalized communities. These contexts comprise instances of politicization of factual claims and naturalization of ideology. When claims previously perceived as ideological are presented as factual, and conversely, when claims commonly received as factual are presented as ideological, strategic silence can often mitigate the harm more effectively. Our argument crucially relies on the idea that positive interventions in these public contexts tend to foster amplification or to generate crossed disagreements, thereby contributing to the rise of polarization.