It's more tongue in cheek, but I wouldn't be shocked if something like this was used to entrap people. The FBI has a noted history of dropping a line to one of their informants via a number of mediums, and then getting some naive or desperate individuals hooked. Of course I don't know if that should be expected from a New Yorker piece, but who really knows.

One way to keep people sedated is to periodically flush out the activists and lock them up / burn them out.

So you do faux activism, get a list of angry younger people, and either spin their wheels doing nothing or fling them into the loving arms of the criminal justice system.