Huge shrug to that. Show me the evidence of the scale of it. 10%? 90%? There's an aspect of this reasoning that delegitimizes real protest movements, of which there are 'a lot', and of course there's a long history of 'a lot' of foreign geopolitical actors (including the US) of agitating actual grass-roots movements, muddying the waters even further.
At this point I think you're being less than honest with yourself. A group organizing 60 protests is organizing at scale because they want to create the perception of a movement.
> There's an aspect of this reasoning that delegitimizes real protest movements
Who cares? Our goal is to tell the truth, not to legitimize this or that. The fact is Russians organize a lot of protests in our country. And they're not the only ones who do.
> I think you're being less than honest with yourself
Are you sure that's me?
> A group organizing 60 protests is organizing at scale
Again: what scale? Are we talking all protests? Some? Half? What is "a lot"?
> > delegitimizes real protest movements
> Who cares?
You would, when the protest is about something that matters to you. The very thing that divides so-called Western democracy from the evil Russians is the right to organize, criticize, and protest against the government. When you can't do these things, you're living in an autocracy, something like, um... Russia?
I'll leave you to argue this one out with yourself.
Specifically, on that point they claimed "a lot of protests that turned violent," implying that Russian agitators were responsible for escalation. Unless the Russian agitators are members of the police, that seems very unlikely.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/17/russian-troll-...