When someone asks you “Hey, why do you think X? I looked at and it didn’t add up” and you respond by insulting them and refusing to actually answer their questions, you’re more likely to get them to disagree with you than to agree with you. There’s therefore very little risk for a CIA plant to do that - nobody is going to be convinced by them, but they’ll fit into the community just fine.

Read over the conversations I had with Cayde and then ask yourself: if I came into the conversation undecided and largely uneducated about the topic, would the way Cayde engaged be at all likely to convince me? If not, what would my likely take-away be?

If people like me would, on average, be less likely to engage in the future, then that should answer your question.

Add to that the encouragement to edit the article. If members of this community are being watched by some intelligence orgs, seeing edits on the site could enable them to better link the activity, especially if someone used an account that they didn’t create fresh for their edits. That may sound like a bit of a reach but every little bit of extra information adds up, and that’s literally what surveillance orgs do.