I think you are completely misrepresenting the literature in the field. There has been decades of research on inner monologues, but whether anyone truly has no inner monologue is still a matter of debate, and suggesting that it could be as much as 50% is absolutely wild.
One recent example is Nedergaard and Lupyan (2024), who used questionnaires on 1,037 participants and found no one who reported a complete lack of inner speech. They did show a link between lower frequency of internal speech and lower performance on sole verbal cognitive tasks.
But this was frequently misreported in popular science news, which may be where you got the idea. For example, Science Daily’s headline “People without an inner voice have poorer verbal memory” and subheading “Between 5-10 per cent of the population do not experience an inner voice” certainly make some bold claims (although still well below your “up to 50%” statistic). But just a few lines into the article it’s been rephrase as “between 5-10 per cent of the population do not have the same experience of an inner voice”. This is more accurate, as all studies agree that there is a variety of experiences of inner voices / monologues, but a different experience is not the same as an absence.
In another comment you make reference to the experience sampling study (where a buzzer would sound and participants would record whether they were experiencing an inner monologue) which I assume is the work of Heavey and Hurlburt. It’s true that they claim that 5 of their 30 participants recorded no instances of inner voice, but let’s be clear about what the experimental procedure was: the participant would turn on the buzzer, which would buzz at a random time (an average of every 30 minutes) and the study was based on two periods of five samples. So, ten data points collected over approx five hours.
Even people with strong inner monologues report different frequencies of inner speech depending on their activities. Many people do not experience inner speech when actively engaging in other verbal activity - talking with friends, watching a video; while quiet focused activities such as golf show much higher reporting of inner speech. So the absence for five individuals of any inner speech during those ten particular samples is in no sense equievlant to “16% of peole have no inner monologue”. Indeed even the study’s authors acknowledge “it is possible that these participants may all have actually had quite similar inner experiences; it is merely the reports of those experiences that differed.”
Tldr: I think you’re making some very wild claims about this subject, without posting sources. No significant study I know of claims that any sizable percentage of the population have no inner voice, (although there certainly is an interesting variety in how frequent and clearly it is experienced.)
I watched a video (can’t remember who or what it was called) that looked into the early days of radio. In the early 1900s it was a massive craze, especially among teenage boys, and quickly resulted in kids transmitting “obscene messages” and calling in fake commands and reports to naval radio operators. At the time there was no encryption or restriction on amateur radio use, and it lead to some embarrassing and dangerous moments for the navy.
The government finally acted in 1912 by forcing amateur radio to be restricted to the shortwave frequencies, decimating the hobby. This was partly driven by an incorrect rumor that these radio trolls had been responsible for, or interfered with the rescue of, the Titanic a few months earlier.
It was interesting to learn that trolls have always been with us, and also that the government could so decisively shape a new form of communication. If the 1980s giverments had banned use of the Internet by anyone outside the military and a small number of commercial or academic licence holders, things would be very different. Sure, the technology would be there and people would run amateur ip networks, or secretly piggyback of official uses, but it would be more like the dark net / tor than what actually happened.