“I think it would be entirely inaccurate to say that the protests that are happening on college campuses, the divisiveness of the debate in Congress and among the public is a result of anything that Russians have done or could do,” [Bret] Schafer [who tracks Russian and other propaganda at the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Alliance for Securing Democracy] said. “I think it would all be there regardless of whether there were Russian bots and Russian state media messaging.”
Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, a think tank, said reports on propaganda efforts by foreign actors over protest movements needed to be treated with caution.
Allegations of foreign influence “can often be used to delegitimize large and authentic democratic movements in the United States,” Brooking said, adding that some critics of the Black Lives Matter protests tried that tactic citing foreign adversaries’ information operations.
A lot of people on here (and likely the author of the article, who buried it at paragraph 17 and further down after and before a lot of arguing for the contrary) could do with taking that to heart. Both on Gaza and on Biden.