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It's the blending of communication channels and operational channels. My local groups had this problem until we developed better practices.

Comms channel is only for rapid response, who-what-where, to get people on the scene documenting everything, informing victims of their rights, and impeding police fuckery. This is considered "public", in that the bar for entry is quite low and the worst that an infiltrator would find out is "hey, cops, in about 10 minutes you're gonna have a bunch of cameras on you", a fact that they'd know soon enough anyway.

People love to chat, so there's a chatter channel. Nothing important goes on here, and things are strictly moderated. The closest thing to operationally relevant information is stuff like "hey, I'm trying to organize X, react if you're interested". Again, worst case an infiltrator knows some vague information about planned actions.

All the resulting planning happens in person or in very tightly vetted invite-only threads. It is possible for infiltrators to get into these, but it requires establishing a lot of trust that's just not gonna happen for a random lurker. For anything remotely serious, at most there's a handful of core organizers updating each other. A lot can be done with 3-5 people without endangering the operation of the whole group, so you keep the scale small until you need bodies. Once you do, you break the action into disparate areas of responsibility and recruit through whisper networks and trusted individuals. These groups do not coordinate directly. If you lose an organizer, you jettison channels and either adapt the plan or start over. It's easy to cut the head off of a snake, so you gotta be a hydra.

And I'm talking a not very large city with an incredibly overbearing police presence. If this isn't going on 100 times over in Minneapolis (and everywhere else), they'll roll up everyone they can identify on "conspiring" or "obstruction" or RICO or similar nonsense charges and hang them up in court/prison until people are so scared/exhausted that they give up or buy into some "emotional" outburst about how we all just need to put a 👍 on a message about doing a little domestic txrrxism to "take back our city".

I do not think mostly anybody should be planning "dangerous" actions (mainly due to lack of opsec and experience), but the writing is on the wall: whether you want to move the needle or just keep yourself safe, you need a cell, a gang, a cadre, not a big tent. Let a thousand gangs bloom. 🌺

By having an organized structure where instructions are handed out by neighborhood captains to block captains, block captains to individuals, that sort of thing. I don't want to reveal too much about how people do things in different areas, but I can tell you that these tactics are already in place in some cities and work "better* than the horizontalist group chat approach, although they are not mutually exclusive. If one person gets access to "the chat" without being vetted, their blast radius will most likely be contained to a block, as unvetted people don't get to be neighborhood captains, etc etc.

Nothing is perfect, so you use this containment and organizational structure to limit the impact and likelihood of failures.

What we see with the big group chats etc is what happens when you are actually quite poorly organized, just taking your first stabs at it. It is what naturally happens when people don't know what they are doing but organize organically, not understanding their threats or how to mitigate them, or cynically prioritizing any action at all over opsec because they do not have the capacity to organize properly. The latter basically sacrifices people for "the cause" and is more common than you might think.