Talk:Outside agitator

First name first

Note that the article started out using first name first in references, and it should remain that way unless there is a consensus to change it. —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:52, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Suggested move

@MatthewVanitas, Mitchumch, Bellerophon5685, Fadesga, Volunteer1234, Antenn050, Pudeo, Anita5192, X-Editor, Daask, and Apollo1917: I suggest that this article be moved from Outside agitators to Outside agitator. Compare, for example: Social justice warrior, Legislator, Pianist, all in the singular. —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:52, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Support. --Fadesga (talk) 10:59, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Support. Sounds good to me.—Anita5192 (talk) 14:02, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Support Daask (talk) 14:55, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

 Done Daask (talk) 16:14, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Article scope and direction

At the moment, the Outside agitator article is about a term used in the United States to discount protests. I suggest the article be about both actual outside agitators and false claims about outside agitators, in any location. This would make Third Force (South Africa) a subtopic of Outside agitator. At the moment, it seems the article implicitly claims that all claims about outside agitators are false, which is an uncited claim, and seems unlikely to me. Daask (talk) 16:13, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Maybe, but maybe not. First question is whether "outside agitator" is even the right term for actual third parties stirring up trouble. And this could be a huge category, including stirring up trouble via social media, and agitators that aren't even human but just bots. Think of Russian hacking of U.S. social media to influence elections. The U.S. CIA has been accused of sending provocateurs to Central America and Argentina, among other places, to incite opposition to democratically-elected governments. What does Wikipedia already have on this sort of thing? —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:58, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

bias call

The article makes no effort to link to relevant and contradictory articles, such as Agent provocateur. MLK is often taken out-of-context as though saying "outside agitators do not exist" when it's been well established that law-enforcement agencies have long been inserting paid informants and trained counterinsurgents into "radical" groups, to the point where some such groups have been found to contain only provocateurs from various agencies, happily ratting each other out to their superiors.

Here's a relevant article: Far-Right Infiltrators and Agitators in George Floyd Protests: Indicators of White Supremacists

~2026-52579-0 (talk) 19:04, 24 January 2026 (UTC)