Going quiet is not going silent.
Support for corporate stance-taking has fallen from 89% to 55% in three years. Presence is a different question.
USC Annenberg’s 2026 Global Communication Report, titled A Quiet Shift, finds support for companies taking public stances on social issues down from 89% in 2023 to 55%, with 41% of communicators saying silence can be the most effective response. Yet 91% say polarisation has made communications more important, not less. Leaders are retreating from contested opinions, not from visibility, and expertise-led presence fills the space.
The retreat, in numbers
A leader going quiet and a leader going silent are not the same thing. One still shows up; the other disappears. USC Annenberg called its annual report this year A Quiet Shift, and the numbers explain the title. Support for companies taking a public stance on social issues has fallen from 89% in 2023 to 55% now. 41% of communicators say silence can be the most effective response, and inside in-house teams that rises to 52%.
What it does not mean
Read alone, those numbers look like a retreat from visibility. The same report says otherwise: 91% of the surveyed professionals say polarisation has made communications more strategically important, not less. Leaders are not being asked to disappear. They are being asked to stop wading into fights that were never theirs.
Expertise over opinions
The practical distinction is what fills the space opinions used to occupy. A leader who has gone quiet still shows up on the things they actually know: their market, their operations, their field. A leader who has gone silent leaves people nothing to trust, and in a polarised environment that vacuum gets filled by someone else. Expertise is the safe ground. It builds presence without joining arguments the company never wanted.
How we think about it
When we plan an executive programme, the first exercise is mapping what the leader genuinely knows from the work, because that is the material that survives this shift. A leader does not need an opinion on every issue. Their read on their own field is worth hearing, and safe to say. Build the presence there, on a cadence they can sustain, and the question of stances mostly answers itself.
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- USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations, 2026 Global Communication Report, “A Quiet Shift”.