Are you willfully or unwilfully ignorant? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
* "innocent" trolling like 5G/Covid/magical cures conspiracy theories that literally cost lives ?
* "innocent" trolling like what resulted in people getting together to try and overturn the latest US presidential elections ?
* "innocent" trolling like what helped drive the point for Brexit ?
It's hard to draw a line between a shithead teenager memeing and an astroturfing or at least organised campaign that brings together terrible things.
Is that innocent trolling as well: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/17/covid-misinfor... ?
And this is very very dangerous for us, because you are not the only one like that, but a lot of policy maker push for these fake arguments as it is very convenient for them to support their policies.
There was an excellent article in HN that explains why you are wrong:
https://www.cigionline.org/articles/disinformation-its-histo...
(Discussion link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27923933 )
You're falling for the pretext that it's all just a joke. And it is, for a while. And then it's not any more.
As said in other comments, the guys are trying to create "a case" from simple and innocent trolling.
We have seen that a lot before:
- Persons become violent because they played violent video games in their childhood: The proof? Some mass murders played video games.
- Messengers/chat are the root cause of terrorism: the proof? Some terrorists used SMS and email to discuss.