Why it is a question
THEORY-242 holds what Vilone and Polizzi’s agent-based models show: with private beliefs fixed, a small hard-core minority can drive 55–60% of agents, nearly all of the majority, into silence, so that expressed opinion leans far toward the minority. Whether the mechanism operates in any real community is open. QUESTION-261 asks what happens once such an apparent consensus is exposed; this asks whether it forms by silence at all.
What would answer it
An empirical study of a real community that measures members’ private opinions independently of what they express publicly, for example by an anonymous survey set beside platform posts. It answers yes if a small, persistently vocal minority goes with a large silent share of the majority, and this silence, not conversion or network geometry alone, accounts for most of the gap between expressed and private opinion. Another simulation, with a different decision rule, cannot settle it: it would show robustness, not that the mechanism operates. Nor can observational data on expressed opinion alone, which cannot separate silence from absence.