Concern trolling

Concern trolling is basically when you pretend to care about an issue in order to undermine and derail any measures that would be taken to address the actual, underlying problem that’s affecting society. Instead, it’s a tactic that’s used to:

• trigger infighting among the groups/people who are actively working on the true problem,
• reframe the argument to try and take power away from an actual, effective movement,
• and to flood the public discussion with noise and distraction, often with tremendous success.

This is a particularly fruitful tactic when the seeds of fear are already present, as it’s extremely easy to take an already fearful (sometimes, justifiably so) group and point them toward an imagined boogeyman, causing them to attack and fixate on a completely extraneous, possibly even non-existent, problem instead.

via https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/concern-trolling/

In any intelligence agency it is important to keep track of crank contacts, not only to improve protection but also to assure continuity of control and analysis. Centralization of records in CIA’s Office of Security permits quick identification of phonies and time-wasters. Professional security officers know how to handle the off-beat approach, and others would do well to rely on the professionals when they receive an irrational letter or find themselves face to face with an apparently unbalanced stranger.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol9no3/html/v09i3a09p_0001.htm