Maybe I'm reading too much into it - whether by design or not, their public statements are serving them very well. They have a strong following (no doubt here, and on LinkedIn all the time I see people "liking" the pap they post), so they are playing to their base.

Second, if your enemy had a choleric temper, antagonize him. The people most sensitive to their stuff (eat bugs, personal carbon budget, whatever insane crap) get bent out of shape, and are still on the fringes enough that they look like the ones who are "conspiracy theorists" (they often are) and make it easy to dismiss criticism as crazy, while out in the open they do their thing.

Like I said, it's probably not intentional, but there is no countervailing force to prevent them from pushing their stuff, and plenty of upside, so they keep doing it.

Trial/trolling balloons drive engagement and data analytics for group/individual sentiment analysis and message calibration.

I don't think they care. They can just shrug and say "Misinformation" and "You need to stop letting the alt-right scare you." And ten years later when you're squeezing the last of the bug-paste ("New Crunchy style!") out of your pre-third shift meal supplement packet and reading on the telescreen how the chocolate ration has been increased to five grams, well, you won't want to do anything rebellious in your safe little pod, lest your social credit scores sink enough that Amaflix and Marv-Ney deplatform your connection, and your options are twiddling your thumbs hoping another gig job makes itself available or you're reduced to leaving your head in the Satisfaction Tracker for one Hertz sampling of "engagement" as a nameless studio shows you pre-vis dumped out of MediaGPT-7 in between ads. Between your worries, your woes, and the relentless twenty smash cuts per second delivery of anything, your attention will be so atomized you won't be able to think back to how it all started.

Could simply be false or misleading reporting. LifeSite doesn't seem to be a very reliable news site. According to Wikipedia:

> LifeSiteNews (or simply LifeSite) is a Canadian Catholic conservative anti-abortion advocacy website and news publication. LifeSiteNews has published misleading information and conspiracy theories, and in 2021, was banned from some social media platforms for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.