I did have links to a couple of papers describing this, but misplaced them, and google isn't forthcoming...
(This immediately suggests a strategy to combat such organization: instead of trying to find out who the leaders are - which will fail, because there are none - one should focus on misinformation to create enough doubt and noise that the threshold for spontaneous organization isn't crossed.)
That said, the decentralised setup has its own issues too. In addition to the misinformatioon aspect you point out, it makes it very difficult to control the 'reputation' of a protest or movement, since any Tom, Dick and Harry can claim to be associated with it and do whatever they want. This makes such an organisation easy to co-opt, or to misrepresent to the media.
Not that that protests have to achieve major results. Sometimes the main thing is to get exposure so that powers that be realize there is foment that needs addressing (in a positive way, not in a crackdown way).
Yes. Quite a lot. The leadership went from not acknowledging their protests, talking down on them and promising to go on with all the reforms, to want to talk, and taking down certain parts of the laws.
In google's case, I think they're just analyzing employee emails etc.
That’s why it’s ill advised to use company email for personal communication. Do it over telegram on your personal devices.
Corporate power resides in hubs and connectors that can be identified and disconnected to weaken the entire hierarchy. Lot of movements succeed because the hubs and connectors shift loyalty.
Niall Ferguson has written a good book [The Square and the Tower] analyzing Historical Events from a network theoretic perspective rather than the usual historical perspective of studying just the top most person(node) in the hierarchy. It has a ton of examples of how all powerful hierarchies devolve.