If activists are willing to intentionally make the world worse to prove a point, then reasonable people start to wonder:

"How much of the problem is real and how much of it is inflicted by activists who are willing to burn down the world in order to 'win'?"

But most protests make things a bit worse while they are happening, even in relatively benign ways as disrupting traffic. If they don't disrupt the status quo in some way then they are hardly going to be noticed.